Senseless Apprentice
by Vladimir Nabokov
Summary: 1996: Fearing being compromised, Snape becomes increasingly paranoid. He trains a secret infiltrator unknown to the Order of the Phoenix. Seneca Sade is to replace him if he is ever discovered, but he's only told her so much. With a war already being fought in secret, Seneca gets drawn in too deep, with only Snape and his questionable morals as her way out. (Explicit Content.)
1. Prologue

_Prologue_

The one thing Seneca knew for sure was that ugly people had ugly souls. This she considered to be true in both of the diametrically opposed worlds she fluctuated between. Seneca was transparently beautiful with the habits of a pervert, the mind of a slob and a synthetic personality. Seventeen, austere and lean at five-foot-eleven, she was blessed with the toned yet wiry body of a far more zealous athlete. To her, the longevity of her body was infinite, continuous. In reality, she was expending her mind and body's remaining half-life, waiting to come undone. Balkanising under the weight of narcotics abuse and hubris. She was naïve of the symbols of vanitas and how Seneca's long-toothed, distant relations would have enviously condescended to her—had any still lived. But they'd croaked: the _vieille garde_ of soothsaying witches of her mother's line had all been killed and the elderly wise-women of her father's had been banished to various institution until their deaths. Only she and her father remained of those two intersecting sets of genetic precepts, shut away in their sepulchral residence like Persephone and Hades.

Her appearance was dictated by a series of polarisations. Regulated black hair just passed her jaw. White, marbleised skin membraned her neat physiognomy. She was very pale, almost unnaturally so. A faint, humanising warmth showed in her features like a candle far behind delicate porcelain. She was one of Breker's _fräuleins_ made taut and tight, her body like a dancer's, a collection of idealised ratios flushed with the heat of a hormonal narcissism.

Apart from blue eyes she held no real ethnic attributes; Seneca was, to some extent, an oddity. The pure-blooded magical community was interbred and she exhibited no real classifying genetic tropes of their group. Her hair was black but her eyes were not dark or green as so many pure-blooded students were. Nor was she Aryan like the rest, and she lacked even the noses or brows that defined the genetics of Muggles. Gaunt and nuanced features gave her away as well-bred and upper-class. Although, she did well to not be so clichéd as to carry the brattish opinion of superior pedigree that many other students of her house displayed—at least not ostensibly. There were hinterlands of repressed synchronicity in her aura that people often mistook for sexual magnetism. She did not successfully shroud the interesting susurrations of her personality in the mystique of her glamorously glacial façade; there was no personality to shroud, she merely reflected emptiness.

She was carrying herself in a dour, watchful way. She seemed agitated, saturnine and misanthropic. Her posture was wrong and determinedly so; she seemed silently demur yet diminutive in presence as if attempting to conceal a privation or difficulty. She almost overcompensated with poorly feigned nonchalance.

There was subtle pride in her mannerisms: an unconscious habit of affectionately touching the sharp ledge of her jawbone in supine self-reverence. The expression of her coldly attractive features were set completely neutrally. Yet she maintained a certain image of irritability. There was a certain aesthetic to her, one unconsciously morbid. It was in the clothes she wore, nothing laughably gothic but Muggle in design and post-ironically inelegant; only just markedly aberrational in taste. She wore black tank-top and drab trousers; a hairband on her wrist and combat boots on her feet. Seneca had once read and quickly forgotten a paper on the Freudian concept of externalising self-image, in which it was written that a person dresses in accordance to how they wish others to perceive them. The paper offered the examples of transvestites, who wished to be viewed as women; and white-collar workers who wished to appear as professionals. Seneca had no personality to express and no way she wished to be perceived. She dressed blankly, an unused billboard: no brands, no statements, no slogans. Seneca was not prosaic, only muted, uncomfortable. Snape had capitalised on that. To him, she was a blind, spastic flickering in the vast network of his comprehensive influence. A defective locus on the orthogonal grid of information he saw. Mondrian's mistake.

Seneca drummed scab-red fingernails on the leather armrest of the black Common Room sofa. She sat, managing to recline without looking relaxed. Adjacent to her, a long-haired Siamese cat slept foetally, purring loudly to the tapping metronome of her anxious habit.

A second person entered from the dormitories and approached from the far side of the room; male this time but a Slytherin the same as her. The name she knew him by was Saccharine. His clothes spoke more about his character than his quietly reserved nature would ever allow him to communicate in an utterance. He wore the magical equivalent of a buttoned-up Wehrmacht M40 _feldblause_ of a deep, dark colour lost in the dim lighting. His standing, Fascist collar and silver embroidery on his shoulders and cuffs opulently ornamented him. Seneca noticed the circular monograph of his initials on his breast. One of many pretentious demonstrations of his affluence. He was properly apparelled as a proper wizard—a _pure-blooded_ wizard—should be. Saccharine came from old money but seemed _nouveau riche_ in his excessive decorativeness. He often resembled Bela Lugosi, occasionally Liberace. However, tonight he wore no fur: an androgynous Ernst Jünger.

The mascaraed, blue eyes set into Seneca's angular features flickered to him. Her posture stiffened to a more awkward pose of someone trying to maintain their carefully selected idiosyncrasies. As he approached, she felt a knot form in her stomach. The hard soles of his black brogues made an echoing sound, tapping the flagstones as he made his measured move across the damp stone of the Common Room's dungeon floor. Seneca could tell at a glance that they had been constructed with little skill but with pseudo-expensive materials. The craftsmanship and stitching looked florid; something her father would have sneered at.

Seneca had grown up wealthy, if not to the extent of Saccharine; the Muggle side of her family had worked in money—bankers, future dealers, stockbrokers—she'd seen what her father's clients wore, she knew what was distasteful and what appropriate. The wizarding world was based around similar principles, they weren't really malleable in any Western society of worth.

Saccharine slowly turned and sat down next to her on the leather sofa. She bridled uncomfortably, looking away to the unignited, cold hearth. The Siamese between them rose gracefully, stretched and arranged itself on Saccharine's lap immediately but without abnormal haste. It resumed purring loudly. Seneca cocked her head expectantly but didn't bring herself to look at him. He made her feel nauseous. His dark, rich and sweet-smelling cologne burned the inside of her nostrils, it radiated a sort of unread unctuousness.

 _Très cher, though._ She thought with distaste. A bad habit of her father's. He would always switch to French when discussing money, oblivious to how inanely upper-class that may have seemed to anyone else. He'd done this in matters regarding clientele, who were themselves majoritively non-Europeans but acknowledged the unspoken procedure of concealing monetary convocation in the presence of the less linguistically educated: children, such as she; or wives, who they largely dismissed and of which her father often entertained but no longer possessed himself, his own having died in Seneca's birth.

Saccharine had always disgusted her, there was nothing else to his relation to her and as far as she was concerned, it was the only response his character's paradigm could evoke. He slowly turned his head to her and she felt her skin crawl. Underneath that clammy, white epidermis, her flesh tightened. He puckered wet lips to speak. The shape of him in her peripheral lent forward a little.

'Now, I am become Death…' He said, speaking in a quiet and rasping voice, like the sound of cicadas slowed down. His soft, un-calloused hands stroked the cat and gently squashed its ears down, much to its delight. His voice made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. Her body produced hackneyed responses, the traditional and universal symptoms of discomfort. The phrase meant something to her, it was a call that demanded a response. She recollected the correct continuation.

'…The destroyer of worlds.' She finished the quotation in a murmur. It was a code, something from a Muggle religious scripture popularised by a scientist of some kind. It was a passphrase that the other side would never think to know. An unwanted concession made in the name of secrecy. She found it ironic to find security in the culture of those they conspired against.

'It's the Shrieking Shack at midnight tonight, that's the meet.' Saccharine croaked back, responding slowly, now that he was confirmed by her response. 'My handler bit so I guess you're in.'

The cat had rolled onto its back and he played with its paws as it affably bit his outstretched signet ring. His mouth twitched; he continued.

'You ought to bring a cloak. Unless you can conceal yourself with your wand… which I doubt.' His tone dripped with condescension. It's frequency felt malign. The cat, unconscious to his nature, gripped his wrist and playfully kicked its legs against his embroidered cuff. He indulged it without glancing down, stroking its stomach. Seneca's wand felt uncomfortable on her outer thigh. Saccharine turned his head as if he'd noticed and she met his hooded eyes this time. A sensation of danger overwhelmed her as she looked into the glass of his stare. They weren't even grey. Pale flecks swam in them like semen about to pierce the black gamete of his pupil.

He was almost as pale as her with thin platinum hair combed neatly into perfectly equal, oleaginous curtains. His face had a distorted quality: its lips were fat, wet and slightly too red; while his eyes were practically colourless and remained fixed forward, almost glazed over but overly doting. She looked at his lateral canthus' slight downward inflection and long eyelashes that accented them so sensitively. He smiled like red Plasticine being wrung, his fat lips split and elongated over his lower face. He was the same age as her, in their seventh year, and a Prefect for Slytherin, someone who was always absent, in the background and undesirable. She barely saw him but he repulsed her. Saccharine seemed to grow bored and brushed the playing Siamese off his lap phlegmatically and without breaking his eye contact with Seneca.

'I can perform the Disillusionment Charm, Saccharine.' She said coldly. 'I'll be there.' Her brain throbbed with distain. His grin was predatory and slightly anxious: a hyena's or a coyote's. A fear grimace.

'Then next time I see you,' He closed his right hand around his left arm and drew his sleeve up. 'You'll be marked with one of these.' On his upturned forearm an impossibly black serpent writhed through the eye socket and out of the mouth of a jet-black skull. As she looked, it mutely flickered its tongue and coiled into a figure of eight as if agitated, it twisted two-dimensionally on his skin. She glanced back at his pallid, smug face and looked away, pushing her hair out of her own. She'd been taken by surprise but she remembered what she was required to obtain: an assurance that Snape needed very badly. She feigned upset.

'I didn't think they'd be so fucking stupid—we're still at school, for God's sake.' She sneered and his mouth twitched in irritation, or maybe amusement, at her Muggle idiom. 'Or did you beg _the Dark Lord_ for that... thing, Saccharine?' He opened his mouth to speak but caught himself and stood up measuredly, careful not to embarrass himself and rolling his sleeve back down. His thin, white face was tight.

 _He wasn't there for you._ The sardonic thought surfaced to her. She was done here. Saccharine had given the game away; what she wanted to know. _He wasn't there to mark you and he won't be there to mark me._ In the midst of this absurdist, clandestine trek, her mind had almost separated from body; her thoughts would whisper. She had spent so long pretending various things and manipulating various people for Snape that she had almost forgotten herself. So her thoughts would speak to her. They would whisper truths and realisations, the fruits of her ambiguous labour. Toil for a classified endgame, she'd pieced together only so much: she was an informant on a group she was not yet a member of. The death-cult of You-Know-Who, the Knights of Walpurgis, the Death Eaters. The whispers she heard were meant for Snape, who possibly belonged to the group she was infiltrating or who maybe worked for someone else. The Ministry, maybe Dumbledore, she didn't know. She had heard rumours of a similar cult in seventies, during the first war, worshipers of Dumbledore called the Order. She wasn't even getting paid. Seneca was a kinaesthetic leaner—Snape had taught her more magic privately than she had ever been able to perform ordinarily. This seemed like the only logical direction her life could take.

'This is the highest honour.' Saccharine hissed, his face turning to an almost pained anger. His humiliation had solidified into a hatred. She returned to him, her mind turning to the matter at hand.

'Not being able to wear short sleeves?' Seneca jibed, she pretended to smile, knowing that facetiousness would incense him and she was not disappointed. Saccharine's face settled into a cold, discoloured seethe. He stood up, fully repairing his sleeve to its original position.

'Not everyone is as accepting of your kind within our order, _half-blood_.' He said quietly, pronouncing the last label in a drawn out manner, it was an insult. Turning from her, he left the way he'd come, back to the dormitories. Snape had told her that half of Saccharine's _order_ were half-bloods.

After a moment, the Siamese cat followed him at a distance in slow-paced pursuit of affection, misjudging Saccharine's temperament for the second time and Seneca's shoulders settled and her tense body relaxed. Dealing with him was always difficult, his presence was abrasive, almost painful in its bringing on of anxiety. But she knew she was going to be seeing a lot more of him. Her immediate relaxation worsened and stagnated into an exhaustion, one she could not satiate as he knew she could not sleep, it was going to be a very long night.


	2. Chapter I

_I: Machiavellianism._

The Slytherin Dormitories were a labyrinthine complex of converted dungeon cells that were undivided by age but separated by gender. Although most former cells had been cobbled together and knocked through to accommodate vulgar green four-poster beds, the spaces still felt slightly claustrophobic and dim; despite, in some cases, the students' attempts to liven them up. Seneca's section was one of the more desirable of the dormitory spaces, which she was grateful for.

Her belongings were neatly formatted and arranged. Her possessions were modest and numbered; she'd never liked to be excessive. She kept her standard issue four-poster bed made basically; as she hated the way the house elves folded and plumped it so ostentatiously.

On the mahogany surface of her dark-wood bedside table, three bound books were stacked neatly on the lateral nearest the bed: _Heart of Darkness_ by Joseph Conrad was the first; stacked on top of it, was _Perfume_ by Patrick Süskind and finally, on top of that, _Lolita_ by Vladimir Nabokov. Other than this tryptic of novellas, which Seneca read over and over as if they shared the same paracosmic continuity, no possessions disturbed the minimalism of the unattractive and densely dark nightstand.

A leather-bound trunk containing a violin, her potions making equipment and her makeup and vanity set lay directly beneath her headboard, under the distasteful green four-poster bed. Next to it, her Nimbus 2001 gathered a layer of dust. She was a Beater and played socially with some of her friends but never made the cut for the Slytherin Quidditch Team; the line she'd usually hear was: _'you've got more of a Seeker's build'_ and the positions would go to some brawny set of well-built aggressive idiots. After a few years of disappointing try-outs, she'd decided to give up, but still found herself attending them annually anyway. Never being accepted, she only rarely played. With her NEWT exams approaching, however, she'd been struggling to find the time.

Across from Seneca's side of the room, another girl, Valeria Sayre, shared. Her end of the room was messier and more chaotic, with a moving _Weird Sisters_ poster and a charmed _Ballycastle Bats_ Quidditch team banner, along with several bewitched polaroid photos of her and her family. Clothes lay in a little mound on the floor next to her bed and the air smelled a slightly stale. Valeria was a plainer girl than Seneca with dirty blond hair and a peachy complexion, her features weren't particularly defined and her personality fitted the _'Slytherin Bitch'_ stereotype the other houses had invented.

Seneca sat on her bed. She was staring listlessly at _Advanced Potion-Making_ by Libatius Borage and her eyes were struggling to focus on the 24-inch essay she had to write for Professor Slughorn on the alchemical properties of something or other. Her thoughts blurred in her head, she felt vulnerable and unprepared. The image of Saccharine's squirming tattoo writhed in her mind, as it had on his arm. The Dark Mark just seemed so permanent to her; before she'd always felt that she could opt out if she got a fright. But she'd played her part well, so far.

Befriending the Malfoy boy in the year below had been a matter of pandering to his inflated ego and wearing her school shirts a size too small. He was an idiot, plain and simple. She'd let him treat her to a clumsy and pretend sticky fumbling in a girl's bathroom stall, tampering with his sexuality and had made all the appropriate comments after. She stroked his ego almost as indelicately as he'd stroked her in those five minutes of indecency that she spent sexually underwhelmed and holding up her pleated Madam Malkin's school skirt. Draco's sweaty palm had cupped unsubtly between her white thighs, his inexperienced, bony fingers occasionally moving up to treat her clitoris like a fat lip that could burst. She'd had to guide his humid hand with her own after a minute of this.

She'd then spent a few more minutes using her practiced and steady middle and ring fingers to make the _come-her_ e movement inside of herself, while her left hand wrapped around Draco's skinny wrist; urging him to clumsily embellish her self-pleasure with sporadic, jabbing clitoral stimulation, which did more to hinder than help. When Seneca had finally reached an orgasm, she made a show of it; utilising a fake cooing voice, which she praised Draco generically with. She then rewarded him by taking her purple nail-varnished fingers in her mouth and sucking off the briny lubricant that glistened on it, swallowing and making a soft and breathy suspiration noise that she copied from a pornographic film, much to his wide-eyed adolescent delight.

Afterwards, she'd simply pulled up her light grey underwear, kissed him on a hard cheekbone and gone to Defence Against the Dark Arts in accordance to her timetable; leaving him without mutual sexual gratification in the female bathroom stall. He'd been keenly trying to assert himself as a _brooding_ and _mysterious_ viable contender for her approval and affection, slowly revealing himself as connected to the Death Eaters by more than just blood through childish, drawling boasts and gloats.

She maintained her image in his eyes as an equally mysterious older girl who was tameable only by his _vastly superior_ character. This she decided on in the following period; sitting cross-legged to comfort her usual post-coital throbbing in her blister-like clitoris. Draco's valetudinarian hypochondriac's nature contrasted with her own personality, which had made this difficult, however, not impossible.

Despite the irritation that Draco was to her, he had led her to Nott, Goyle and Crabbe—who'd turned out to be a waste of her time; they were sympathisers of the Dark Lord but kept themselves out of the affairs of their parents. Then he'd introduced her to Saccharine, who was the crucial last link. That greasy, red-lipped creep of a Prefect had gotten her directly noticed the circle of Death Eaters that were responsible for recruiting, or so she'd hoped, anyway. It all came down to what would happen tonight.

Up until now, it had been a game to her; be Snape's little senseless apprentice; _a_ _loose cannon, a kid on the edge with nothing to lose_ , spying and coercing into the circles of potential Death Eater children at Hogwarts. But now, the vision of the Dark Mark curling on Saccharine's arm in her mind's eye, she was scared. She was realising that as of midnight tonight, a much more serious commitment was going to have to be made.

 _But for what?_ A voice whispered in her brain, a nagging splinter too deep for her to pull out with the metaphorical tweezers of her half-hearted oath to Snape. _Why are you doing this? Snape couldn't give a shit about you. You're his plaything. You're expendable. If an Auror catches you, they'll kill you or lock you in Azkaban. Snape will just find another pretty Slytherin. He'll want you to go further next time. He'll make you a killer. Then the Order, if they even exist, won't want you and you'll be on your own._

The thought of death terrified her, Azkaban was worse. She still remembered her fourth year when Sirius Black had been on the loose and Dementors had been stationed in the Hogwarts Grounds. The eerie way they floated like black-shrouded and drowned bodies against a permeant gunmetal sky had petrified her. To think of them touching her made her feel an itch all over her body. They filled her with a nihilism and depression that she'd never naturally experienced. When she saw them, she saw only her father's belt hanging over her child self, dark memories of her childhood that filled her with despair.

She knew that she needed a distraction, it was best to play this by ear, she thought. She reached under her bed for her trunk, pushing aside her dusty Nimbus 2001 to pull her heavy leather-bound case from its hiding place. She opened it.

Inside lay her violin and its bow, which she removed gently. Not unlike her Quidditch playing, her tendency to practice had fallen out of habit, however this had happened far before her Quidditch playing had been put on hold. Seneca plucked at the strings; the instrument proved to be wildly out of tune so she tuned it from memory, humming the D, G, A and E notes softly as a reference. She took the bow in her hand and treated it with a bar of greasy rosin that she kept next to the violin in a polished, mahogany box. Now lubricated properly, Seneca drew the bow over the D string and added vibrato with her other hand. The sound brought back a memory that she hadn't wanted to revisit as she progressed slowly into her best efforts at a half-remembered Bach's _Chaconne_.

Seneca was taken back to her first year at Hogwarts. 1990. She remembered befriending a girl on the Hogwarts Express whose name was Dolores Urquhart. Seneca had liked Dolores almost upon meeting her, back then Dolores had been a dark-eyed girl with two mousey-brown French plaits and pinkish cheeks who was interested in jinxes and had told Seneca all about them. They'd both used their newly acquired wands to try and cast some made-up ones on some _Chocolate Frogs_ that Dolores had bought. Seneca had told Dolores about her mother being a Ravenclaw student and, to her delight, Dolores had said that her mother had also been one, while her father had been in Slytherin. Seneca embarrassedly told Dolores that her father wasn't a wizard, which had made her wrinkle her nose.

Dolores had gone on to say that houses tended to run in the family, which meant they'd be able to see each other a lot if they were both sorted how they should be. In Seneca's juvenile excitement she'd jumped at the opportunity of a friend in the dauntingly new and intimidatingly strange wizarding world. Just as Dolores had predicted, they'd both been sorted into the same house, the Sorting Hat taking only a second to decide. However, as the ceremony went in alphabetical order, Seneca was sorted first and into Slytherin, much to her confusion. Dolores looked equally perplexed as they had exchanged a furtive glance while she walked uncertainly to the Slytherin House table. To Seneca's glee however, Dolores was also sorted into Slytherin and all was forgotten; Dolores putting it down to Seneca's mother and saying that 'cunning was very close to cleverness' as they shook hands with their housemates over supper _._

Elated, the two eleven-year-old girls had chatted excitedly as they followed their Prefect down into their new Common Room. Once finally alone together in the adjoining dormitories, Seneca had said she wanted to show Dolores something special and had opened her new and heavy leather-bound case to produce her violin which she began to play. She'd mainly improvised and tried to express how excited she was, a few mistakes punctuated her ballad but she worked with them and progressed naturally, integrating them carefully into the song as to hide them. Seneca remembered how she played until the tips of her fingers were numb and she had to stop. She remembered looking up at Dolores, grinning, whose indifferent face showed no appreciation.

'Did your muggle father teach you that?' She'd asked, laughing. Seneca had been taken aback. Picking up her new long-pointed wand, Dolores flicked it at the violin in Seneca's numb hands. _'Specisus sonus auribus.'_ She'd recited eloquently and the violin jumped into life, playing itself far more beautifully than Seneca could ever have hoped to play it. 'This is what my father taught me.' Tears had stung in her eyes then as she looked at Dolores Urquhart's face; that sneer of cold command as if lifted from Shelly's _Ozymandias_ as she'd listened to the perfect and mournful bars of the superior violin song. 'Why don't you just use a wand?' Dolores had giggled over the din of unblemished, constant vibrato, as if using a spell had been the most straightforward answer to a desire for music. Seneca's father's years of careful lessons had been made completely redundant by Dolores' one, simple incantation. It was then that the eleven-year-old Seneca had cried, letting go of the violin which stayed fixed in the air, playing a beautifully slow piece, that Seneca would have taken years to perfect by muggle means, as if to be parodic soundtrack for her redundancy. Dolores had become bored with Seneca and had walked off as she sobbed, as if their whole day of budding friendship had been a meaningless exchange of pleasantries at a social function. The violin didn't stop playing without error until Seneca had gone and found a Prefect who came into her dormitory to disenchant it. After that, all Seneca had wanted to do was go home and not be sitting in a cold, dungeon room in a world that had no need for her and her unnecessary non-magical skills. She remembered getting angry and smashing her newly unpacked VHS tapes on the hard stone floor. _What was she going to watch them on anyway?_ Presently, Seneca's violin playing mirrored the notes she recalled from that unhappy first night at Hogwarts. Now more upset, Seneca replaced the violin back in her dusty trunk. She altered the position of her potions-making kit to better accommodate the violin and her hand brushed against something that lay underneath it. She pushed the kit aside to see what it was. Not recognising the item, she drew it out of the trunk. It was a shallow lidded Tupperware container straight out of a 1980s-muggle kitchen. She undid the kitsch synthetic clasps and opened it. Inside lay a pile of broken black plastic shards which were interspersed with spools of videotape. On top of these, an art-gallery postcard of a Degas ballerina lay. She turned it over in her pale hands. On the other side, a message was written in a harshly slanted black font.

 _Seneca,_

 _I know that you're going to be difficult about this so I'm letting you know now that I will not be reading your reply to this letter. You won't be coming back to London this Christmas. I'm afraid that I've got a lot of work coming up and I'd prefer not to have to look after you. Please notify your housemaster that you won't be leaving school. I will see you at the end of the year. I trust you can make your way home by yourself. Do not let your violin playing slip, you have been progressing recently._

The postcard made Seneca feel a lump form in her oesophagus. A tight choking

feeling was forming that came with wanting to cry. Her father's briefness had made her lip tremble then as it did now.

Her mother had died before Seneca could was old enough to remember her face. But her muggle father had always said that Seneca was identical to her, which had made her feel unsettled, like she couldn't be her own person and was only a manifestation of her mother's memory. A ghost. Because her father had been so in love with her mother, every time he'd pointed out how alike they looked and how _'proper'_ and _'grown up'_ Seneca looked, commenting indirectly and perhaps unintentionally on her budding breasts and painted lips, she couldn't help but wonder if her father was also attracted to her, which made her feel uncomfortable.

 _Maybe that's why you never want to see me._

Perhaps it was because he couldn't stand the torment of her mother's shade maturing into the mirror of her mother's body, so well mapped and known by him—seen in such private contexts. Maybe he harboured a perversion that he could not help. How vicious it must seem for his most loved and mourned to appear before him again: the same posture, mannerisms, habits, voice, body, breasts, back and nape. But she was a fruit of a tree that's seed he had sown himself; and thus, could not ever pluck and eat. Instead, he would have to endure watching it being eaten by some undeserving other or wilt and die and fall from the branch of its own design. The longing he would feel would be so shameful. But these thoughts disturbed Seneca deeply and she reassured herself in the ambiguity of her purposefully under-thought guesswork.

She hadn't had the heart to disappoint her father by saying that she'd been sorted into Slytherin. Seneca had lied and told him she was a Ravenclaw until her father had found her Slytherin uniform neatly folded in her trunk when she'd been away from home. When she returned to their generous and lonely London home, she'd cried and apologised only for him to taker his belt to the backs of her twelve-year-old legs for lying. Seneca could remember seeing the disappointment in his eyes shift to anger. She wondered if he was disappointed and angry because she'd lied or because she had broken the immersion of his fantasy that she was a perfect replica of his poor, lost bride.

Seneca dropped the letter onto the floor, a few unwanted tears blurring her sight a little. She drew her wand; a long and thin ebony shaft, adorned with very delicate carved runes. The dragon heartstring core seemed to almost hum with her emotion.

 _'_ _Incendio.'_ She cast, her voice cracking and the postcard caught fire. The ballerina on the cover curled as the flames consumed it. The brief fire flickering out as soon as the flames had reduced the postcard to charred grey flakes. She looked back at the raped Tupperware that lay open on the side of her bed; the mound of smashed black plastic and videotape lay there still. She remembered now, that the box had housed the lunch she'd made for her first journey to Hogwarts. And the smashed VHS tapes were the pile of broken plastic and film, from after she'd shattered them on her first night. Now she sat with her wand in her hand, the violin by her feet and the destroyed videos on her left. All things that reminded her that she had no one; she was a half-breed prostituting her sexuality for passage into a world and an organisation that meant nothing to her. She had been under the illusion that Snape had been grooming her for his apprentice because she stood out; because she was special. Now she saw what Snape must have seen: a lonely girl with no family that mattered, no friends that would go to any measures for her, no morals, no self-respect and a talent for holding onto anything that made her feel like she had a meaning. This time her stinging eyes gave way and she wept out of repressed self-hatred and the realisation that she was alone. Salted tears streamed down her made-up face, smearing her makeup so it ran together and came away in her hands, ruining yet another of her things.


	3. Chapter II

_II: Psychopathy_

'Swear to me.' Snape hissed into Seneca's ear, his sweaty palms on her bare upper arms. 'Why tonight? Why was I not aware of this?' He had her pinned to the damp stone wall of Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom. His eyes were like a mad dog's: rabid. His lank hair was pushed away from his face and tucked behind his ears rather uncharacteristically.

'I don't know. I swear it's true. I'm being sworn in tonight. The

Rendezvous' the Shrieking Shack at midnight—'

'But you're not ready.' Snape interjected frantically, as if she didn't know this herself. 'Your mind is weak. The Dark Lord will know.' Snape's sallow face had turned slightly puce. His slippery hands trembled from how hard he gripped her bare skin, that was sunken into the recesses of the anxiously tensed wiry muscle of her triceps.

'He won't be there. I asked Saccharine if he'd begged the Dark Lord for his mark and Saccharine almost said, _'He wasn't there.'_ I just know it. I could tell by the way he held his tongue.' Seneca countered, she moved in his grip uncomfortably. This made Snape loosen slightly, although she couldn't tell whether he was reassured by her response or because she'd made him aware of his stiff fingers. His hands relaxed slightly on her white arms.

'I should have been told. Saccharine should have known to come through me.' Snape went on, still not entirely composed.

'I only know what I was told, Professor.' She tried to squirm out of his hold and he let go of her arms suddenly like he'd not noticed that he was restraining her.

'Saccharine's been marked?' Snape asked quickly. He still stood a little too close to her. She made a small nod, her face was turned away from him to avoid the smell of his soured breath.

'I saw it.' She added, watching out of the corner of her eye, Snape's lip curling. He drew away from her sharply.

'If it were you, I might not have minded, but Saccharine is beyond my control.' He said desperately as he turned away from her, his offhand moved in gesticulation that was uncharacteristic of him. 'As for Draco; he's just a boy. They're both unreliable and rash. They're liabilities.' Seneca wasn't sure if he was talking to her or to himself. His face was strange, sleep deprived and slightly unclean looking; he looked more ill than usual. His usually sallow complexion was tainted even more so with a discoloured nicotine yellow.

He became more lucid and focused, stepping back a few feet, suddenly aware of his intrusion of her personal space.

'Try the Patronus Charm again.' He instructed, almost immediately calming into his usual contained and reserved self. He manipulated himself as if his flight of fearful desperation would go unnoticed if he ignored it. He simply assumed again the manner of a firm handed extra-curricular schoolmaster that he so often steeped himself in in their private sessions together.

From her recruitment in September, to the present November, he had been making her practice advanced spells and magical techniques. She was a fast learner but Snape was an insensitive teacher. He was easily angered by her mistakes, not to mention her lack of aptitude at Occlumency. He made her read extensively on magical theory but didn't give her enough time or opportunity to practice and advance. It was infuriating.

She took her wand from the waistband of her jeans. It was ebony, twelve and a half inches cored with dragon heartstring. It felt cold as if it was already unwilling to perform the spell; she had not been able to summon a corporeal Patronus so far, only succeeding in producing blue cigarette smoke vaporous wisps that left her more and more suspicious of her lack of ability being down to an underlying stupidity.

She brought her wand in a slow small arc trying to focus on her magic and pointed it away from Snape, delicately twisting her wrist and inflecting her wand to recreate the movement illustrated in her recommended textbooks.

 _'_ _Expecto Patronum.'_ She said clearly. Nothing happened. Snape was already beginning to look irritated, his attention span was always shorter if she began by failing.

'Again.' His sneer of cold command was palpably communicated in his almost hyperbolically annoyed tone.

 _'_ _Expecto Patronum.'_ This time she tried to focus on something happy, like she'd read about in _Adept Conjuration_ and several other books Snape had required her to read. She forced the memory into her mind's eye of watching Hogwarts appear out of the mist on her first year, sitting at the back of her rowboat, holding hands with the not yet lost Dolores. The memory of how that budding friendship had ended broke her concentration. She tried to switch memories quickly, hearing her name being called out for the Sorting Ceremony. A trailing wisp of shimmering silver trailed weakly from her wand. This was a repeat of all other attempts she made. It was humiliating that Snape insisted on watching her never progress past this point and then reprimand her afterwards.

'Once more.' Snape said indifferently. He demonstrated the wand movement slowly without casting. 'Remember your fond memories.'

 _'_ _Expecto Patronum!'_ She called, recalling the excitement of the Triwizard Tournament; seeing that Quidditch Player, Viktor Krum, blind the Chinese Fireball with that brilliant red curse.

She let her train of thought progress and remembered going to the Yule Ball and ordering her dress from one of the smaller tailors on Diagon Alley. She recalled the feeling she felt when watching the seamstress cut it from the dark shade of purple velvet that she had picked out from the countless rolls of fabric that lined the walls like academic scrolls in an archive. She'd tied a matching bow cut from the same velvet into her hair and she'd gone with a Ravenclaw from her Potions class that she'd chosen at the last minute.

However, the event had only been a medium which she used as a canvas on which she could metaphorically paint her pent up hormonal narcissism in vivid thrashing strokes. Even the boy who escorted her, was a vessel that filled with anxiety of not being able to please her and thus she tenderly sapped him, engorging her own subtle vanity.

He hadn't aroused or stimulated her by any means but she'd suggested that they snuck off to an empty classroom none the less; if only so she could practice her manipulative processes on him and feed the ebbing, yet still mildly insistent adolescent lust that she indulged only to fatten her sense of satisfaction that constantly required upkeep inside of her delicate and skinny ribcage.

He'd kissed her with an awkward inexperience and she had to show him what to do with his hands, which irritated her. They'd gone further and the boy, no doubt a trying to enlarge his own sense of self-worth which was probably constricted by his teenage virginity, was merely an instrument for her own satisfaction. This mattered little to Seneca; she was in fact unaware of her own hubris. It did not even occur to her that she could not remember her partners name or even recall his face, despite sharing three dances and a sticky back-row classroom encounter with him.

However, the memory of her indulged excitement filled her body with warmth that seemed to be channelled through her wand arm. A slanted interpretation of a happy memory seemed to have sufficed to feed the spell.

Her wand bucked hard unexpectedly and she gripped it with both hands, maintaining control. Snape took a reproachful step back, no doubt her apparent success had not been expected. Jarringly, something blinding-bright exploded from her wand tip; a celestial white mass that lit up the inside of the dark shuttered-up classroom and formed more delicately into a defined body. It circled above their heads slowly.

Her patronus was big, over a few meters in length; it swam slowly above them like they were underwater. She tried to make out what it was but the light still stung her eyes. She squinted. It was a waterborne animal for sure. It passed by her face and she stepped back, it was intimidating, a vacant eye stared through her as it passed, and rows of serrated triangular teeth studded its pointed jaw. It was a shark. Maybe a Great White but she couldn't be sure. She watched it circle a figure of eight around her and Snape's feet, and then glide over the rows of old wooden desks and tables between them and the door.

She'd always assumed that if she could ever cast a Patronus, it would be a mammal or maybe a reptile to reflect her house, but a shark seemed more interesting the more she looked at it. It was beautiful and a little frightening at the same time. It filled her with a sort of reverence.

She looked at Snape, the black board framing him and his palled sallow face seeming more satisfied. Seneca's mind turned back to their previous mood and the seriousness of her current situation turned her back to her sullen mind-set.

The celestially translucent shark broke into ribbons of curling silver-blue that faded and died and her wand arm felt heavy with the weight of the magic she'd just preformed.

'A shark?' Snape said, his adenoidal voice inflecting the question oddly. 'That's the first I've ever seen.'

'What's yours, sir?' She responded, misreading his tone as mocking. Snape looked slightly taken aback by the question; he paused. His little black eyes narrowed in a squinting twitch like he was unsure if her simple question had been some deeply disguised jab at him.

'A spider.' He said and looked away. Seneca recoiled faintly; she hated spiders but wasn't surprised by Snape's response. He had made her quail when he'd grabbed her. His lank hair and sickly face, with its black button eyes and emaciated cheeks reminded Seneca of a picture of an Acromantula she'd seen in her one of her Care of Magical Creatures lessons from a few years ago. His fingers were long and narrow like they had extra joints, too, which added to his arachnid-like physiognomies.

'I hate spiders.' She said clumsily, realising the awkward pause that had developed.

'I know.' He said and smiled the same way that Saccharin always did, but then Snape had always seemed to prefer him academically, despite his instant criticisms of Saccharine's lecherous and perverse little character. 'Focus on closing your mind. Your thoughts radiate from you, especially when you casted your Patronus.' Snape mused, watching Seneca colour. His lip curled into a sneering smile again and he chose his next words carefully, nasally lingering on every pregnant word as to embarrass Seneca as much as possible. 'I don't want to have to relive your quaint classroom experience every time you practice.' He looked irritatingly smug. Seneca's wand seemed to hum with humiliation in her tight grip, it had an almost undetectable habit of feeling like it must be compulsively used whenever Seneca felt any strong emotion. She was never quite sure if she imagined this or whether the complexities of Wandlore bound it to her conscience over time.

In that moment, she felt something. She sensed him reach out with his mind and try to touch hers and she resisted, shutting her brain off hard. Her wand twitched involuntarily as she cleared her brain of emotion, blocking him from entering and taking advantage of her strong embarrassment. Yet another of Snape's teachings: Occlumency. He constantly beat her down with relentless overpowering mental attacks that she had only recently been able to parry with any vague effect.

'That was good. You controlled your emotions.' Snape said, his words lacking condescension but also any form of approving tone. 'Once more.' He commanded and Seneca tensed unintentionally. Snape changed his manner completely, abandoning his brooding still posture for an offensive duelling stance, if only for a second before he cast.

 _'_ _Legilimens,'_ Snape's black wand-arm rose in a quick practiced movement and the spell hit her while she was unprepared. She tried to quickly force her mind shut but he had already found an in. Her vision of the classroom violently disintegrated and reformed into a vague blurring swirl as she fought Snape's intrusion and tried to take back control of her conscience. She suddenly weakened and he cracked her mind wide open. Snape dragged her through her memories, plunging her into a montage of retrospect. It was a strange thing to lose control of your own mind by a master of such an art. It resembled emotionally, the feeling that you might experience when seeing someone pick up something incredibly dear to you and very physically delicate and then watching them almost drop it.

She was now completely within the confines of her own mind; the spell removed all correlation between her consciousness and the classroom in which she still stood. Her vision had reformed into a scene of degeneracy. A fifteen-year-old Seneca was propped against a wall at a party; heavily intoxicated. Snape stood behind her, clad in his usual black robes, out of place with the teenagers who moved around him, oblivious to the manifestation of his consciousness that was superimposed over their memory. His face was disdainful but also cruelly triumphant. Seneca turned back to the version of herself passed out against the wall, embarrassed. She knew Snape liked to make her feel that way. He tried to fight him off but he pushed deeper into her mind. Back through the layers of her memories that stacked on top of each other.

The scene dissolved and her vision reshaped into her London bedroom. On her bed, a lean boy with blond hair had his arms around her younger selves' waist, who was on his lap facing him; her legs wrapped around his hips. They were kissing each other overenthusiastically and her younger self broke apart clumsily to pull her grey tank-top off, exposing the unblemished paper coloured skin of her breasts underneath; the chalk white negative image of a rudimentary swimsuit top and bra were superimposed over them. Such a personal nuance of skin pigmentation between two, almost the same, skin tones on each side of her faded summer tan-line felt so personal to her – even more than the sight of her budding pink nipples that were being covered roughly by the boy's lightly calloused sepia-coloured palms. And to be looked upon by someone so disgusting to her as Snape was so insulting to her that she was eaten up with hatred and humiliation. Seneca's face burned and she pushed back against Snape mentally but her own emotions were too strong to control.

She looked around for his manifestation, mentally trying to tear down the scene around her. She could sense his amusement at the attempt. Unlike the last memory, Snape wasn't in the perceptual room with her. His omniscient presence was still an undeniable part of the experience despite his non-tangibility.

She psychologically tried to force him out of her head; instead of forcing down her emotions, she weaponised them, channelling them against his mental barrier. She immediately felt something shift in their relationship of power; a crunching of his own mind's defences under her mental force. She was surprised; she wasn't even in focus, but it was as if she'd used her emotions as a battering ram and he had been completely unprepared.

She turned around in the conjured bedroom. Her younger self and the boy had disappeared. She turned again and saw Snape instead. He stood eerily in the corner of the room, staring at the wall. She was confused, the scene dissolved yet again and reformed into a different room, one where Snape fitted in. A dark mauve coloured peeling wallpapered room with splintered dark-wood floorboards came into clarity.

 _Why was he standing in the corner like that?_ She suddenly felt more in control; as if their roles had been reversed.

But when she looked again, Snape was no longer crammed into the corner of the room. Instead, a much younger version of him was huddled on the bed. A parody of his older self; his curtains were longer and more tangled, he wore an undersized grimy set of school uniform trousers and shirt. Seneca's bed flickered and dissolved into a bare mattress on the floor. The younger version of Snape was sitting upright on the bed. One leg was drawn up to his chest, his arms loosely hugging it, his sunken in cheekbone rested on his kneecap. His other leg rigidly drooped off the edge of his mattress and his heel softly but fixatedly bounced off its narrow vertical surface. He drew his wand up to the damp spotted ceiling and he started to hex down the flies that circled the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. He cast nonverbally despite his obvious young age. His dirty face was tearstained and his greasy hair hung down over his face. Seneca had never considered whether Snape was a gifted duellist until now. She wondered if his skills had levelled parallel to his progression of age.

'Enough!' Snape's adult voice echoed in her mind and Snape broke her fleeting moment of mental superiority, the Defence Against the Dark Arts room swimming into the foreground again. 'That's enough.' He said again more conservatively. Snape hadn't moved from the blackboard; his wand was still in his hand.

'Sorry.' Seneca murmured. She realised that what she'd seen was probably something quite personal to him. She recalled his gaunt thin face with tear streaks running down it.

'Why?' Snape snapped untrustingly. Seneca was taken aback but she opened her mouth to explain.

'I—' She began. She felt something roll stickily from her nostril to her lip. She touched her finger to it, frowning. Confused, she looked as it came away capped in a black-crimson droplet of blood. She looked to Snape; he stared indifferently at her, his lips still pursed in apparent preparation for a sneer upon the delivery of the statement that Seneca had initiated to deliver. The bleed began to quicken alarmingly.

'That…' He regarded her with an almost distasteful sideways glace, 'is the price you pay for pushing too hard, with your emotions.' He raised his wand, smiling when she flinched slightly in reaction. Her hands had clasped around her solely Caucasian and delicately constructed nose, the blood ran unnaturally thickly and darkly between her thin fingers. A gentle pattering of liquidly spherical blood-drops bursting into a series of red-fingernail sized smatterings on the hard stone floor.

 _'_ _Concreti Sanguine,'_ He said, aiming the wand; a condescending inflection to his spell, which Seneca knew he could have easily cast nonverbally. The healing charm making the bleeding in her nose stop immediately. _'Tergeo,'_ He continued, clearing the blood from her hands and face.

This last spell was unnecessary and humiliating. She felt like a child standing before her disapproving mother, who dutifully cleaned her bloody knee with the corner of her kitchen apron. He made her feel stupid; but then again, that was his special mannerism and something that only he could really do.

'There is one more thing.' Snape interrupted her discomfiture, turning away from her. He gestured her to follow him as he retired to the Professor's Office, which was conjoined adjacently to the long Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom. She followed him with pseudo-dutifulness. She thought about what she'd briefly seen; a young bat-like Snape, in despairing repose, nothing more than an angst-ridden crying boy in a horrid broken-down house.

 _How unbecoming._ She mused, but she thought quietly as to not be sensed by Snape's ever-extended mental feelers of his mastery of Legilimency that probed the consciousness of whomever was around him. He held the heavy wooden door for her, their eyes met awkwardly and Seneca looked quickly away from his passionless face.

The office was decorated sombrely, like a funeral arranger's she thought. The grey stone walls were unadorned, save for a few suspiciously dark arcane artefacts that were displayed sporadically across the perpendicular lateral. Old and yellowed parchment diagrams of various recognisable and unrecognisable anatomies were displayed, Seneca could spot sections of the human brain, marked with pseudo-scientific labels and strangely, an illustrated intersection of a large portion of female form cut vertically from navel past the tailbone, which she found distasteful. Above this, a large full-size anatomy of a werewolf hung looming over them in exquisite detail, like an awful yellow parchment and palling black ink band poster, various segments of it stripped away to reveal the labelled diagrams of muscle and sinew beneath.

A crude and dull gun-metal sneakoscope rested on a shiny mahogany work desk, surrounded by scrolls and inkwells and essays. Seneca could spot an ancient 1960s looking slide-projector that Snape very rarely used in class, buried under the debris.

The room was poorly lit with large off-white candles that burned softly. Light streamed through the cracks in the shutters exposing the invisible lint and dust that hovered in the air. In the centre of the room, was a wooden table; old and splintered. On its surface, a jar containing a grey-winged moth sat, and beside it, was a long and slightly rust spotted iron nail. Snape was standing by the jar, so that the table was between them. He gestured to her to approach.

'Seneca, I am sure that you are alert to the dangers of what may be asked of you tonight, and as you are of age I will not patronise you by repeating them.' Snape addressed her slowly as he gently undid the jar's lid. She nodded, not that it did anything to progress the convocation as Snape was focused on the items on the table.

The moth flew delicately and made an eight shape in the air, just as her Patronus had done, before it gently landed again on the table. Snape drew his wand with one hand while taking the nail in the other.

 _'_ _Engorgio'_ He muttered, pointing his wand at the landed moth. It grew to triple its original size; so that it could fit in the palm of the hand. Snape cast the spell again, still quieter. And the moth grew even bigger, so that it matched the size of a bird. At this second unnatural development, Seneca drew herself back a step sharply. She could see her stark white face reflected in its fly-like multifaceted eyes, and she stared in disgust at the arachnoid arthropod's legs, like fat fingers covered in a translucent fuzz of wiry silver hair. The thing looked like an enormous winged spider, it's powdered grey wings were the marred semitransparency of the Dickensian Miss Havisham's crumbling vale.

To her horror, the animal suddenly attempted to jump once more into flight, extending the vulgarly distorted butterfly wings that so unnaturally sprouted from its grotesque abdomen. Discoloured patterns, that could only be seen when the creature was so magnified, spread into a dreadful wingspan that matched an owl's. Seneca raised her wand defensively but Snape was already upon the creature. His right hand enclosed around the escaper's thorax, its flailing legs tangling with his insectoid fingers. He forced it down heavily onto the table with a single fell movement; his reactions were surprisingly agile. It thumped there, squirming mutely, the shelled faceplates of its head clicked together in a horribly audible display. Snape snatched the rusted nail with his off-hand, knocking the jar onto the floor, smashing it.

Then, like a sadist with a talent for lepidoptery, he impaled the thing with phlegmatically indifferent violence, directly between its wings and he forced it against the table. He drove the nail, as if it was a stake, through the thick armaments of its chitin exoskeleton and down into the wood of the table.

And yet it lived. To her degusted intrigue, he did not kill it; only fix it there, to that splintered table. Snape continued his line of thought as if there had been no interruption.

'There are techniques within the Dark Arts…' He fixed her gaze as he stood over the flailing limbed giant moth. 'Of which there is no defence.' He stressed this last part dearly. Seneca nodded.

'I know about the Unforgivable Curses.' She said. Her wand, still drawn, flicked at the shattered glass on the floor which reformed back into a jar and fell in reverse back onto the table.

'A Dark Wizard's arsenal is far more extensive than those three curses, Seneca.' He glanced at the moth. 'But you will need to know how to use them later in your tutelage.' He gestured at the moth with is wand. 'For the time being, you will practice what I do teach you on such…' He paused, and looked at the moth again, '…creatures, that I produce, because I know you have a special weakness for such things.' He smiled faintly and beckoned her closer. 'The Dark Arts are ancient and ever-changing. The reason why there are charms to heal, is because there are curses to wound.' His eyes lit up and widened slightly as he moved the convocation into his favourite subject. 'The Ministry regulates new spells created by whoever enters them for approval. But Dark Magic is practiced clandestinely and much of this is unknown to them.' Seneca nodded again. 'Dark Magic must be practiced with the intent to harm or it will be resistant to you. Recite what I have taught you about this.' Snape instructed.

'My magic is the sceptre of my desire, therefore for it to become weaponized it must be aimed with emotions of maliciousness.' Seneca listed the words as second nature dully. He usually began teaching her by making her repeat seemingly pointless phrases to attach a basis on which she can learn. It was a method to make her more responsive to his instructions, she thought.

'Torture this creature.' Snape instructed lightly. 'I'm sure you already know the incantation, and there is no real art to it at; no special wand movement.' He almost smiled. Seneca looked from Snape to the fidgeting moth, fixed to the table that became its alter. Her wand arm felt limp and heavy.

'But—'

'Don't linger, Seneca. You have to mean the curse or it won't be so effective.' Snape instructed more insistently, interrupting her. She focussed and raised her wand, pausing. Channelling her hatred was far easier than channelling her happy memories for her Patronus. She simply let her anger consume her, she let the disgust for the creature bloom into distain. All she needed to do was surrender. She surrendered the scrap of morality which flitted in her chest for the furthering of her magical ability. _Ambition is a Slytherins best quality._ She thought sourly.

 _'_ _Crucio,'_ She hissed, her wand arm coming close to impaling the creature again. She could feel a taint in her wand that she had never felt before. A sort of corruption of its core. It felt like injecting a narcotic or losing her virginity but much more ominous than that. Her wand seemed to be open to its new use, however she could sense that it almost warned her of what she was doing, a slight cautious resonance in her wands bucking. The subtle differences of what it felt like in her hand said all.

The creature thrashed violently and to her horror, the mute clicking of its mouth-plates were replaced with a small twisted subhuman cry of pain, that only an animal could truly make. It shook and beat its ashen wings. A high-pitched two-toned squall of agony. It unhinged her slightly. Its fist-size insectoid eyes angled themselves at her. She knew it was incapable of rational thought, yet it unnerved her to meet its reflective gaze. It scuttled its long chitin legs against the splintered table, making a scrabbling noise. It screamed again and Seneca felt like she was drowning a puppy-dog, tears blinded her vision. she cast the spell again out of impulse, doubling the creatures suffering. She lost sight of what she was doing, stopped listening, stopped watching it and cast again and again until finally, once the creature had reached its nadir and released a cacophony of beating wings and shrieking mouth and scratching legs did Snape finally end the exercise with a small gesture of his delicate bound black wand which caved the things skull in and putrefied its eyes. He looked at her with a look of passionless indifference that she would never see. She stared vacantly now, her posture drooped, her eyes wide, staring at the blown open face of the beast. And as it dripped black drops onto the stone floor and as she saw again, in her mind, the simple wave of the hand that Snape had used to kill, she finally understood the quote from the muggle scientist that Saccharine used as a password.

 _'_ _And now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds'_

That's what Snape was after all; and soon she would become the destroyer as well. She would become Death, the inflictor, the destroyer. Snape.

But she had wept all her tears already and instead of crying all she could do was just bathe in her own aching amalgam of horror and lamentation.


	4. Chapter III

_III: Narcissism_

The Slytherin Common Room was sparse at ten-thirty at night; Seneca coming straight to it after Snape excused her. He had pressed a square of folded parchment into her sweat-slickened hand, which she crumpled into the pocket of her jeans shakily as he dismissed her. She'd walked nauseously straight back to the dungeons, stopping only for a brief moment to collect herself in a bathroom stall; thinking that she was about to throw up, but she only heaved dryly, her clammy, trembling hands squeezing the sides of the cold lavatory bowl in coincidently the same stall that she and Draco had shared. The lack of vomit she attributed to the fact that she had next to no apatite recently.

In the Common Room, there was an absence of the usual busyness of weekday homework sessions and the circular rotating movements of gaggling, chatting girls. Instead, they were replaced by a few scattered house members who sat seemingly as far away from each other as they could, the Slytherin temperament meant that the house members often lacked the unified collectivism that the denizens of the warmer-hearted houses showed. Seneca cast her eye over the scattered anti-socialites sequentially.

To her right, straightened and even-ended white-blond hair, so commonly congenital in those hoary pureblood females, topped the head of a girl in the year bellow her. She was showing Seneca her pretentious but elegantly inviting cardiganed back, so that her sharp shoulder blades and indented spinal dip showed through the stone-grey cashmere. Seneca looked at her bra-straps, a barely perceivable set of double lines that gently perturbed the cashmere's lake-water smoothness. She was overcome with an alien longing, the slow-burn of backburner passions that sweltered in her overflowed. The familiarity of the girl's slender back was almost sensual, an arousal bloomed hotly in her lowest umbra. The girl's bony right hand was writing her name on a ' _Quidditch Team: Late Entries'_ form with an immaturely undisciplined grip on her chewed black quill. Seneca noticed a little indigo ribbon, not dissimilar to the one that she had worn on the night of Yule Ball, resting in a fold in this silver-blonde's shiny platinum hair, as if to invite Seneca to brush it softly with her lips in an expression of repressed homosexuality made incarnate in a carnal kiss—or perhaps to gather her hair in a slender-fingered vice and rend it from her soft, pink scalp; it incensed her so with that scalding emotion so close to burning bile or hot, hard lust but never either entirely. She choked that confused sensation down into the recesses of her id.

Seneca could read the vainly curled, italicised signature from across the room. The overcomplicated D for ' _Daphne'_ and the pointlessly embellished G for ' _Greengrass'_ made her cringe a little. The girl had been a friend of Dolores Urquhart for a while, before that bitch of a girl had dropped out after her OWLs and gone on to a failed apprenticeship at _Borgin and Burkes_ ; undoubtable followed by another dead-end artefact dealership operating out of Knockturn Alley or some similarly conspicuous location. Seneca's interest quickly dried up and she disregarded her, moving on.

Across from her, a seldom seen, uncomfortable and swarthy looking boy was guardedly reading a battered copy of Tolkien's _The Silmarillion_ on one end of a leather sofa as if he ironically needed the escape of a fantasy world that he lived in with some alternate magical paracosm. The boy was muggle-born and bullied harshly for it. Seneca paid him no notice; this escapist lone-wolf was a nonentity and she cared little for his shy, wary glances and quiet voice.

Between him and Seneca, were the reserved presences of two others; one male and the other female. The girl was around five-foot-two and slenderly built; her pretty name, Genevieve John, sounded like a lyric from a song that Seneca could never quite place. Her face was soft and very pretty and lacked the sharp angularness that Seneca's own features were based upon. Genevieve's complexion was fair, but Seneca was still fairer; however, Seneca was not gifted with the warm gently blushed cheeks of this girl's inherently Irish features or the compassionate sandy scattering of puerile freckles that dotted her nymphet's nose and the areas below her modest but beautiful blue eyes. The gentle slope of her boyish nape was half hidden by her long red auburn hair that reached almost to the small of her chastely white bloused back and a few loose strands failed oh so coyly to conceal her little love-bitten neck.

She stroked the fluffy Siamese cat that purred on the low coffee table in front of her. Seneca recognised it from her convocation with Saccharine and seeing her play so lovingly with the animal that his hands had lecherously caressed was oddly purifying.

Genevieve's belongings were spread carelessly around her; her slightly oversized dark-green coat was arranged into a nonchalance puddle of fabric folds so that a guitar capo and a packet of strawberry-flavoured Honeydukes chewing gum spilled onto the flagstone floor in front of them. Her gnarled driftwood wand poked out at a jaunty angle from the pocket of her discarded cotton cardigan that was heaped over the leather arm of the sofa that Seneca had so anxiously drummed her fingers on earlier that evening.

A boy sat by her side, so that she was between them. He had about a head on her but was not especially tall. His black-brown hair was slicked back loosely so that it fell into two wavy curtains when he didn't run his hand through it, which seemed to be his habit. He was shallowly pale in an almost yellowish tint; if he had been tanned he would have been olive skinned. He was a little gaunt with indifferent brown-green eyes but a half-smiling mouth as he watched Genevieve at play with the Siamese. He gazed so longingly at her in seeming contentment. Seneca recounted mentally Conrad's description of Marlow in her bound and well-thumbed copy of _Heart of Darkness_ :

 _'_ _He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect'_ She smiled at the now apparent similarities that had never occurred to her before between this background boy and her most beloved protagonist.

Seneca couldn't recall his name despite his face being familiar to her for many years. He sat behind her in History of Magic and was in her Defence Against the Dark Arts class but they had probably exchanged little more than awkward half-hearted hexes in their practical sessions in which they had been occasionally paired.

She knew that had tried for the position of Chaser when she had attended the annual try-outs at the beginning of the year, whether he'd been accepted she didn't know. He slid the sleeve of his collared black shirt up his arm to check his diffident leather and metal watch that braceleted his thin wrist, looking discomforted as a pewter cufflink bit his skin when ridden so far up his arm.

His muddy-green eyes flickered from the watch's face to Seneca's and he smiled as if he knew her more than he did. Repairing his sleeve, he returned his attention to Genevieve and whispered a few drawn out but affectionate unheard words in her ear, behind which he fixed her red hair with his middle finger and thumb. In response, she giggled and kissed him goodnight, calling after him something about him being _'smooth'_ in a laughing singer's voice as he walked towards the male dormitories.

Seneca waited until the boy hand crossed the stone threshold before approaching. She was drawn to this girl, for some unidentifiable reason she was intrigued and pulled-in by her. Seneca sat down slowly and lightly, like she would if Genevieve had been a sleeping cat that she didn't want to startle. The girl seemed particularly gentle, her character was sweet and good humoured, but Seneca felt the urge to reserve herself as to not shatter her delicate body, should she touch her or scare her away.

Seneca had never really questioned her sexuality and had always just assumed that the gender of the object of her desire had little significance. Maybe it was because she'd always found her own _female_ body so arousing and intoxicating in her own privately narcissistic moments that she felt the way she did about other enigmatic _backfische_ on occasion; those ethereal blackfishes in the shimmering waters of her self-reflexive desires. If only she had been born as an identical twin, so that her own arousing image could finally stop haunting her mind. If she could only have that perfect Gemini _beau_ , or she supposed, _belle_ —then, she would find her illusive lover.

She remembered that when she was a little younger she used to stand in front of the big floor to ceiling mirror in her bedroom, back in London, completely naked and simply stare at her emerging figure for maybe half an hour at a time; transfixed. She'd had longer hair then and she'd sweep it behind her shoulders to better see her breasts and the skinny ribcage that they rested on. She would stare at the reflection of her incarnadine nipples that would stiffen from the cold of her unheated room as soon as she dropped her quickly outgrown bra onto the cold wooden floorboards. The constantly narcissistic quest for the callipygian figure obsessed her as well. The positions she would contort herself into in order to see herself from various angles, were creative and numerous, she would look at paintings and drawings of nudes in various Art History tomes and gallery guides that depicted the apotheosis of femininity, in accordance to certain depraved French Surrealists. Some works would make her curious, things she had never thought of or seen before in Bellmer's illustrations of Bataille's _L'Histoire de l'oeil_ , for example, had flushed her with a strange anatomical arousal at the various depictions of vague, fleshy debouchments. The book itself, from which the illustrations had been made, was a little novella that her father had consequentially removed from his study's bookcase after observing her standing on her tiptoes to reach it. She had seen him in her peripheral vision, watching her, looking at her naked feet and along the parallels of her long, white legs from across the room, where he ambiguously worked on some unknown adult bureaucracy. It had been mid-summer, in this particular memory, in the feverish early August heat. The temperature had had a narcotic effect on her, the underlying, sexual feeling of something just beyond her reach goose-bumped her sweat-glazed skin continuously, oftentimes exploding in a frustrating conflagration where she struggled with some unobtainable desire, the irregularity of a newly occurring menstrual cycle and a confused feeling towards her father she wanted to disappear or at least become clear. He'd looked at her and she'd prickled with some sensation. Almost a pleasure. She'd read Freud, Jung and a collection of their more obscure contemporaries in order to further calibrate the finer imbalances of her developing mind, which to her, felt like a Cecily Brown painting; a churning pink and red depiction of a subliminally carnal compositions. Her father was a great believer in the semi-pseudoscientific propositions of psychoanalysts that wrote academically and by proxy his interest had manifested itself in her, so, she read. Ruminated, reflected. Concluded. Dismissed.

Once she was slightly older, she'd use a hand mirror to look at what lay between the two cheeks of her puffy, white labia-majora. As soon as the downy baby hairs between her legs had darkened she had taken her father's straight-razor to them and hating the course black stubble that intruded on her soft skin, she quickly began to use wax obsessively and meticulously. After that, she'd remained completely hairless from below the eyebrows as a matter of preference and later as a matter of pleasing her partners. Now, the two ran together.

She would gently spread apart the two soft segments of her fixatedly hairless exterior to see the shallow dark red internal of her body that was enclosed by her black labia-minora—she could only look at these by spreading herself open with her nail-polished middle and index finger while holding the hand mirror at just the right angle. The clumsy self-discovery of adolescence consumed her thoughts and actions, she even had half-remembered dreams of strange sensations, swellings, lurches of elation that she could never quite recall.

The perverted excitement doubled as she began to menstruate regularly and fully this time, adding a whole new dynamic to her fascinations with herself. She became more compelled to carry out her strange rituals while her new bodily function exercised itself; a bead of blood falling like a full stop on her hand mirror's surface, another dark droplet leaving behind it a black-red line as it travelled hesitantly down her tensed inner thigh only to be smeared by Seneca's index with curiosity as it graced the side of her kneecap. She would taste it on her tongue. Metallic. Slightly later on, she'd roll back her fleshy hood to expose her clitoris, but this was only after her discovery of a labelled diagram in an anatomical manual she'd found on the top shelf of one of her father's many bookcases in the drawing room.

This experimental basking in her physical maturities soon became a self-fulfilling normality that developed into an anxiously obsessive and compulsive habit, like so many things that were unspoken but tabooed in her lonely single-child and single-parent household. Her need, and indeed fetishized want, to see herself in such naked and vanity-based positions had slowly been replaced by the need to experiment with the sensations that she could glean from touching herself when she looked; this in turn developed into a masturbatory routine and a sexuality of her own that drove her even now. Having been based on the prologue of her self-obsessive practises, her sexuality was unsurprisingly prone to deviations of the gynophilic nature. The heightened compulsion to explore her body in the mirror while she was on her period translated awkwardly into an insistent monthly arousal even after ovulation, something she had discovered to be an abnormality from _girly chats_ with a friend named Candida at school. After this, she came to look at her heightened urges at as a bad habit that she tried to not indulge, however unsuccessful she was. She was shameful of this peculiarity despite it being one of many. Even so, she could never muster the determination to persevere and not masturbate while menstruating, even on her first few attempts when her habit was young, despite the humiliation of having to awkwardly tell her father she'd had a nosebleed in the night, something which she knew he didn't believe. Even now she would still furtively indulge herself, however disgusted she would be at her bloody fingers afterwards.

But Seneca would never have labelled herself as anything other than completely heterosexual, despite her occasionally homosexual desires for other girls that interspersed her usual casual feelings. She had noticed that she had exclusively been attracted to girls who were not dissimilar to her: tall, mildly athletic whites with dark hair and a preferably strong eye-colour, jawline and cheekbones, this obnoxiously narcissistic, but subconscious, preference she dismissed as a prerequisite for her to feel validated in her own slightly alien sexuality by having a genetically similar and thus compatible homosexual partner. However, this was in actuality a falsehood propagated by her own inherent need to deny her vanity, which stapled her character.

She had always been the more submissive and patient partner in the few numbered occasions where she had successfully engaged in an interaction with another female of a carnal nature; which contrasted with her opposition to being the object of sexual intercourse heterosexually, that was found in her hatred of the missionary position and preference to _'ride cowgirl'_ , as it was colloquially nicknamed by her friends and the lurid blushing women's magazines they read, with their cautious little double entendres and innuendos.

Perhaps the reason for her not feeling the same need to assert herself as sexually dominant, despite the fact that she was, in a heterosexual experience, the receiving partner, was because she was never fully willing to be the giver of gratification that wasn't her own, sexual or otherwise. If she was to ever think about these things objectively, maybe she would have recognised the fact that her inability to reach orgasm unless she was _'on top'—_ another vocabularic playfulness of those awful _areola pink_ _'witches'_ magazines—was because of the ever-present mental scaring of her physically abusive father. His dominance over her made her all the more uncomfortable to indulge a partner's power over her. Or perhaps, it was the micro-scaled comments about Seneca's striking resemblance to her sensual mother that gave her so much sexual aggression and it was the feeling of needing to reclaim her own individual romantic persona that drove her to be so controlling in intercourse.

However, Seneca wasn't attracted to Genevieve in the erotic way, not by any stretch, instead she felt a _need_ to speak with her, a compulsion that was mental not physical, as if it had already been decided by someone that that was what she was going to do next. She had delayed too long, deliberated on the beauty of those puerile features that were sadly not her preferred flavour however charming they may be. She had been drawn into her mind, her childhood, once more as she too regularly did.

Seneca had been sitting next to her, slumped into the corner of the sofa and staring at the lovely girl as she played with the Siamese. She wasn't entirely sure what she wanted out of a convocation, maybe it was just to pass the time, or get to know someone she'd never paid much attention to. Her eyes met Seneca's for a second and she smiled. Seneca pretended to smile back courteously. She'd never been a very warm but not really an unpleasant one either.

'Is that your cat?' She said, maintaining the façade. Genevieve looked surprised for a second before smiling and giving a shy nod.

'His name is Eddie,' she said, looking at her a little timidly and rubbing the cat's stomach with her small hands, 'and I love him.' She said, more to the feline than to Seneca and putting on one of affectionate voices that people felt the need to talk to their animals in, as if somehow, they would better understand. Seneca thought this was sweet and smiled genuinely for the first time that night. She watched Genevieve fawn over the handsome cat. 'I'm Genevieve, by the way.' She continued, as if they hadn't been in close proximity for the last seven years. Then again, Seneca thought, they had never even been acquaintances. Her most vivid memory of Genevieve, before now, had been watching her be too afraid of heights in their First Year Flying Lessons to get more than a foot off the ground, much to the amusements of the brash and irritating Gryffindor students. 'You're Seneca, we used to sit next to each other in Charms, remember?'

Seneca didn't remember but she smiled and said she did anyway. Genevieve's manner was mellifluous and she didn't want their convocation to be discontinued by a _faux pas_ on her part. Seneca felt elevated, to an extent, by now amiable and kind she seemed to be. Genevieve kept talking.

'You play the violin, right? I used to hear you play from my room but you don't do it all that much anymore.' She added cheerfully. Seneca smiled at Genevieve's almost adorable attentiveness.

'That's right.' Seneca answered and looked back at the Siamese, who was being scratched behind the ears. 'What's that capo for? Guitar?' Seneca gestured over to where it had spilled from Genevieve's pocket.

'Yeah. I sing too—and play ukulele, sometimes—but I forgot to pack it this year.' She said enthusiastically.

'How come I don't hear you play?' Seneca replied, a little unsure how to approach the genuine friendliness in Genevieve's voice. She'd expect as much from a generically keen Hufflepuff but not from a Slytherin.

'I share with a girl called Astoria.' Genevieve looked behind her and pointed at the back of Daphne Greengrass' white head and added in a whisper. 'Her little sister.' Before turning back around. 'Astoria won't let me play because she says guitars are stupid and for muggles.'

'I had the same sort of problem.' Seneca smiled wryly. 'These people know the price of everything but the value of nothing.' She thought about the countless hours she had practiced alone in her father's house. 'If you want you can come and play in my room; Valeria's a bit of a bitch but she's never really around.' She said, looking at Genevieve who nodded softly, meeting Seneca's eye for only a few seconds before she shyly looked away.

'Thanks.' Genevieve looked a little uplifted.

'Who's your boyfriend,' She changed the convocation to avoid a pause and shifted in her seat to a more comfortable lounge. 'I think he's in some of my classes.'

'Oh, that's just V.' She said with a smile, Seneca admired an adorably dark freckle on the left side of her upper lip. 'It stands for _'Viridian'_ … His last name's _'Low'_.' She added mistaking Seneca's lack of response for a pregnant silence. Seneca nodded slowly and watched her take another stick of bubble-gum from her Honeydukes packet and put it in her mouth, offering Seneca a piece which she declined politely.

'What was he whispering in your ear?' She added slightly meanly, expecting her to blush and not being let down. She seemed easily embarrassed but eager to converse.

'He was just being smooth.' She laughed a little nervously. 'But he said something about you too.'

'What was it?'

'It's sort of hard to explain but V fancies himself a bit of a seer.' She stopped and laughed again. 'He takes divination, can read you quite well—he just guesses stuff right more than a lot of other people and that sort of thing.' Genevieve said, obviously trying to convey the semi-serious nature of it. Seneca became interested. 'It's a bit of a joke I suppose—'

'Indulge me.' Seneca interrupted a little more impatiently than she meant.

'He told me to tell you _'The Prince already rolled the dice twice but it's the Senseless Apprentice's first turn tonight. Remember that a die has more than two sides'._ ' She replied quickly as if reciting a poem that she had learnt for school.

 _I am Ozymandias king of kings look upon my works ye mighty and despair…_

'What?' Seneca said irritably. 'That doesn't make any sense.' She was disappointed. Genevieve looked a little amused as she ran her small hand through her coppery hair as if to mimic her boyfriend's habit.

'That's just what V said.' She replied smiling.

'I want to talk to him.' Seneca replied shortly without pause.

'He's gone to bed.' Genevieve said in playful defence.

'I know.' Seneca snapped back, the pressure she felt making her irritable. She stood up abruptly. Genevieve's smile faded into a cautious look.

'Well I'll be seeing you, I suppose.' Genevieve said carefully and Seneca ended the exchange awkwardly.

'You too, Anna.' She replied stiffly as she walked across the woven rug and through the threshold of the boys' dormitories.

The boys' rooms were marginally better the females' rooms. The walls in some areas gave away to magically strengthened glass that looked into the shimmering depths of the murky green lake; the occasional dark movement of a shoal of fish of maybe even the silhouette of the giant squid casting long dark shadows randomly along the damp stone walls.

A student with a closely cropped blond head and suspenders that hung down on the thigh of his trousers sat on the floor in front of his four-poster bed. He eyed Seneca suspiciously as she walked past his dormitory's open doorway.

A dark young boy, probably a first year, shot her another vindictive little look as he laced his shoe in the corridor. She knew that she wasn't supposed to cross over to their side. After seven years of uncharacteristically abiding by this rule, it felt rather liberating. Another boy that she recognised from her Transfiguration class was walking in her direction, looking mildly bothered by her as he swept mousy long hair out of his tepid and undefined face. She called out to him.

'Looking for Viridian Low – where's his bunk?' She said, her female voice sounding out of place even in the quiet of the boys' dormitories. The boy looked mildly annoyed.

'First right—little way down yonder—third one down the hall.' He said in a mixture of inter-city Northern Irish and Westcounry bumpkin accent that matched his pink cheeks and glazed features of a farm-boy. She nodded in thanks ignoring the look he gave her and she proceeded as per his instructions and found herself outside one of the samey black painted doors that were identical to every other students' area. She knocked on it.

'Viridian Low?' She called. There was a silence for a second.

'Yeah, hold on a second.' A voice returned, lower than Saccharine's but more rasping like a smoker's rather than croaking and course like his was. There was a sound like the sliding of steal and the handle tuned as Viridian swung open the door.

They were exactly the same height, if not proportioned differently. His wand was in his hand, which was relaxed at his side. She looked to it cautiously, recognising silver lime wood immediately by its sheen. Her eyes looked back into his muddy-green ones as he slowly put his wand away in his back pocket, abashed.

'Are you coming in or what?' He asked. Seneca walked into his dormitory noticing the muggle bolt on the other side of the door, which was undoubtable self-installed. He caught her looking and smiled. 'You can pick a lock with a spell but not a bolt.' He grinned and tapped his nose.

Viridian was sharing with a familiar-looking Asian boy from their year who was a little taller and scruffier; he slept in his clothes on top of his bed on one side of the room which had a high ceiling but wasn't as spacious as Seneca's and Valeria's was.

A poster of that band everyone was listening to: _'Nirvana'_ , was suck on the inside of the door; the yellow smiley face staring at the back of Seneca's head. Rock posters, muggle and magical, coated the walls along with a _Millwall_ football scarf on Viridian's side of the room and a _Tokyo Tsuchinoko_ Quidditch Team banner on the other. A police mugshot of Charles Manson was fixed next to the old Ministry distributed wanted poster of Sirius Black in an amusing satire; the longevity of the enchanted paper having expired long ago. The room smelt slightly stale and sticky like the scent of old sex and sweat but not so vividly that it blatantly originated from something lascivious, she thought.

'Are you going to say something or just stand there and look around like you're retarded or something?' Viridian said, grinning a little and running his hand through his dark hair. A copy of _The Annotated_ _Lolita_ lay open on his bed next to where he had just sat down. Seneca ignored this comment and pointed to it.

'Like Nabokov?' She asked, referring to the author.

'Not as much as you do, Sen.' He smiled slightly too widely and it became suddenly unattractive. She thought she felt a clumsy second presence in her mind, an irritatingly, unpractised flittering between her eyes and her brain. 'Can't put _'little Lo'_ down, can you?' He asked rhetorically and mockingly. 'Who does H.H. remind you of then? — _Your father?_ —Now Sen, that _is_ interesting.' He twisted his words into sardonic jibes and laughed a little falsely. She blocked his next mental probe with her Occlumency training, feeling his confusion as she emptied her mind. His presence became like a desperate, clawing hand reaching for her thoughts that she held out of reach. It quickly relaxed and recoiled to save its dignity.

'I can feel you in my head, Low.' She closed her mind completely as Snape had taught her. Viridian was much easier to defend against than he was. 'Your magic doesn't work on me.' Seneca smiled and Viridian's fading grin turned to a dispassionate half-smile, his eyes had never once become warm nor had they blinked.

'See through my little spell then, Sen?' His usual half smile was permanent even in speech. 'Where'd you learn a trick like that then?' He said slyly. His oddly generic London accent seemed to have no particular directional peculiarities; an easily forgotten monotone that was very meticulously and gently inflected to indicate his almost undetectable maliciousness and, at times, his distaste.

'Where did you?' She replied and took a seat on Viridian's unmade and unwashed bed next to him. She noticed the broken foil wrapper of a _Skyn_ condom, half hidden under his dirty pillowcase. Seneca reached across him quickly and snatched the tacky black and gold wrapper from its poorly concealed hiding place. The left-over lubricant from the inside of the packet had congealed into a whitish paste that slickened her fingers; she grinned, amused.

' _'_ _Viridian.'_ That's a wizard's name… Exactly how pure of a name is _'Low'_ , though? Not a _Sacred Twenty-Eight_ name, that's for sure.' She sneered a little, feigning prejudice to throw him off of his line of questioning and playing with the packet in front of him. 'Where'd you get one of these? They sure as shit don't sell them in Hogsmeade. What are you a Mudblood or something? There's spells for this kind of thing, you know?' She said in patronising, mock condescension and laughed.

'I'm pure enough.' Viridian said quietly as if Seneca had touched on a sensitive subject. 'We're cousins of the Rosiers and related to the Flints.' He ran his hand through his hair. 'They're _Twenty-Eight_ names.' He said with a little more conviction. Seneca smiled and tucked a strand of black hair that had fallen over her face behind her slightly pointed ear and rubbed her black eyebrow with a painted thumbnail.

'Aren't you going to introduce me to your cellmate, V?' Seneca redirected the convocation jokingly, looking around the dingy dungeon room covered in posters and then to the sleeping Asian boy on the bed.

'That's Kazuo, don't you know him? I thought I saw you with his sister?' Viridian squinted.

'Who?' Seneca asked, she didn't know many Asians.

'Kitana or Kitty or whatever; she's your friend, right?' He asked. Seneca remembered her suddenly, feeling bad for not naming her immediately as the two had indeed been friends. With everything going on in the last couple of months, she'd mostly crashed out academically and socially. Her friends, or close acquaintances as they should probably be called and of which Kitana was one, had mostly drifted away from her save for a few.

'Oh… yeah, I know her but I didn't know she had a twin.' She felt worse for not knowing so basic about her. She supposed she'd been too busy talking about herself, Kitana was a good listener. 'They don't really look alike.' She justified herself poorly.

'Kazuo doesn't like her much. I don't think so, anyway. I haven't see them around together since our first year.'

'Neither. She might have mentioned him once or twice but I didn't connect the face to the name, I suppose.' She paused, slightly ashamed that she'd never made the correlation. 'Is it safe to talk with him here.' She asked. Viridian shrugged.

'Don't see why not.' He said. Wary, Seneca remembered the spell Snape had taught her for a situation like this. She drew her wand from the waistband of her jeans and gave Viridian a reassuring look when he made for his own, stiffening.

 _'_ _Muffliato.'_ She said softly, creating an invisible zone where she could not be heard by prying listeners. 'Now we can speak freely.'

'About what?' He smirked irritatingly, unenthused by her spell.

'That thing you said to Genevieve – when you looked at me – about the dice.' She said. Viridian shrugged and lolled back next to her on his messy bed.

'I don't know, it just came to me as I was saying goodnight.'

'Like a prophecy? What does it mean?' She asked desperately. Viridian shrugged.

'Does it matter? What's so important about it anyway? – Don't think no one notices you slinking around the castle on your own all the time.' He squinted at her and she felt him try and claw his way into her mind. She resisted hard, a pained expression crossed his face like she'd hurt him for a second before it faded again into his usual unfazed façade. 'What are you up to, Sade? You don't have to tell me; just let me in.' He made one more grasping mental attempt to snatch at her _arrière-pensée._ She felt the angered rise of choler quicker than she expected

'Don't try it, Viridian. You don't want this.' She said and stood up, lifting her tank top an inch as she walked backwards towards the door, revealing her black, runic wand handle that she rested her thumb on in a neutral suggestion of her preparation for violence.

 _He's an idiot, there's nothing for me here._ She thought. Viridian looked annoyed and amused at the same time.

'Leaving so soon, Sen?' He called to her as she crossed the dim cluttered room to the door with the black and yellow _Nirvana_ poster tacked to it. She put her hand on the handle and twisted. 'There's something in your pocket, Seneca.' She stopped, remembering the note Snape had pressed into her sticky hand as she left that dim sight of the moth-murder. 'It's trying to get out. You should read it.' He said in a blank tone. She looked at the floor for a moment, her combat boots standing on a digitalism essay by some unknown muggle mathematician. It was out of place in this castle of magical study, this crucible of the arcane. The duality of the half-breed, she supposed, Viridian was no more a pureblood than she was.

Viridian's hand gripped around her bare upper arm all of a sudden, scaring her, his nails digging into her muscle. She bit her lip trying not to jump and tasted blood on her bottom teeth.

'Don't touch me, Virid–' She stopped mid word, looking back at him and freezing. His eyes had glazed over and they stared in unfocussed directions, independent of each other. His face was suddenly shiny as if he'd started to perspire slightly, his expression was agonised and pained.

'Fear he who can destroy.' He spoke in a strained tone; his voice was horse and the words seemed to be choked out of him. 'Fear the perfumed man; he will be your undoing.' From behind him, Kazuo seemed to writhe in his sleep, a moan of unrest escaped his unconscious mouth. The energy of the room became highly charged. She went for her wand but he let go as if a spell had been broken over him, his eyes re-focussed and then closed, he stood slumped over creepily.

The note in Seneca's pocket seemed to burn through her jeans. She turned to the door, keeping her eyes set on Viridian, she didn't want to turn her back on him again. The doorknob clicked and she exited with haste, almost running down the now deserted corridor and through the unpeopled Common Room back to her dormitory space.


	5. Chapter IV

_IV: Resplendence_

Seneca's eyes readjusted to the poor lighting that she found upon emerging from the tunnel out of Hogwarts' grounds. She'd read Snape's note on her bed, the sleeping Valeria providing a respiratory metronome to her addled mind's hurried thoughts. The note was brief and dispassionate; having been written by him while she stood unresponsively staring at the blown-open moth and pressed into her sticky palm as soon as the sepia ink had dried.

The note very dispassionately instructed Seneca to use a Levitation Charm to touch the knot on the Whomping Willow in the rainy grounds with a rock, which she did, and then follow the secret passageway into to the Shrieking Shack. She'd walked down the mine-shaft-like claustrophobic tunnel, bending low to pass through the gnarled roots of the aged tree. She descended into the cold damp bowels of the earth, thinking of Dante descending towards the Inferno or Marlow plunging into the Heart of Darkness in search of Kurtz. She'd cast the Disillusionment Charm to conceal herself whilst scrabbling in the dark over the rain-washed tunnel-soil; but upon reaching the end of the tunnel, she found only the bland and battered corridors of the shack and thus she need not have bothered.

The house was essentially colour-coded sepia and grey with an assortment of destroyed former furnishings, an ascetic peculiarity to its heavily tonal atmosphere, a xenophobic rejection of her in its smallest details; a tarantula shrinking into itself on her unknowing approach, an irritated emotion to its creaking floorboards. There was a judgemental aura to its recently disturbed layers of inch thick dust and tepid choking air that was overly saturated clouds of yet more dust.

The front room was to her left, the black monolithic barrier of the tall painted door separated her from the ominous location within. She was afraid of what she might find behind it. Out of place and disturbing the continuity of the coal-coloured door, a sheet of parchment had been fixed to the wood; apparently by magic, as no fixing agent seemed to have been employed to fasten it. On the high-quality creamy parchment, high and slanted letters spelled _'S.S.'_ in a skilfully italicised black font – the letters, she assumed, were presumably for her initials but she couldn't be sure. It was irregular and ambiguous, she wondered why her name wasn't just written out in full, if that's what the letters really stood for. The meaning of the letters was trivial, she decided; her anxious nerves were playing with her ability to judge things clearly.

Seneca muttered the counter-spell to her Disillusionment Charm, smartly rapping her head once lightly with her wand tip and coming out of her state of shimmering near-invisibility. The sensation was unpleasant, like a trickling of icy water traveling counter to gravity, in a series of vertical streams up her bare skin; it was intrusive to feel.

She slowly closed her pale hand around the cold brass doorknob and twisted it gently. The door hinges creaked loudly in a clichéd manner into what had probably been a living room, its furniture was mainly absent or spread in debris throughout the former domicile; the stained wallpaper was peeling and moulded damp spread across it in patches. Suspiciously animalistic and oddly long gouging marks scarred the wooden floorboards, splintering them in some places; too long and deep to have been made by any animal Seneca could think of. She tried to pay them little attention, the Shrieking Shack was dauntingly supernatural enough without them.

She stepped into an oddly lit room with thick hazy air that held a familiar smell she had never smelt in the Wizarding World, smoky and chemically. The colour pallet of what other areas of the house she'd seen were washed out greys and grimy beiges like an underdeveloped polaroid photo, the grainy chemical quality and nonadjustable shutter-speed creating a hyper-saturated picture that was devoid of opalescence.

In this room however, the light of flickering candles that burned softly in red tinted candleholders juxtaposed this. They gave off a faint neon glow that reminded Seneca of those seventies cyberpunk movies where depictions of neo-Tokyo were bathed in the light of glowing Coca-Cola billboards that grew along the vertical surfaces of skyscrapers. This effect was added to by the shoals of heavy rain that beat on the glass of the shuttered and boarded up windows to her left.

She was received by three men in a tryptic of varying heights and levels of oddity. Like Bacon's _'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion'_ , they were surreally unexpected and very strange, caught in the actions of whatever they had been doing by the earie red light that made the space resemble a photographer's darkroom.

The left-hand figure was a perfect emulation of a stereotypical _'Dark Wizard'_ ; exactly what she'd been expecting. He was a thin and lean man with long shiny black hair that was streaked with an iron hue. He tied it at the back with a thin green ribbon in a drooping loose bow. The style was very reminiscent of a judge's wig, only his was without the pompous curls.

His prominent chin and hooked nose would have made him look like a fairy-tale witch, had it not been for his youthful features and lack of black facial wart. Dressed in a buttoned long overcoat with an exaggerated black sheepskin collar, he stood still with his head cocked inquisitively towards her, interrupted in mid convocation; he seemed to look to and beyond her. She saw him run his tongue over his lower lip a little as if he was nervous. Seneca knew his face from his wanted poster and identified him as _'Enemy of the Ministry of Magic Number 33: S. Selwyn'_ as they referred to him on those pasted and pictured pamphlets. She couldn't quite remember what that _'S'_ stood for in his first name, however. The red candlelight played on the angles of his facial extremities oddly.

The second man, to Selwyn's right, was shorter and less malicious-looking wizard. He lolled lazily against the wall, dressed in dark grey formal robes that were embellished with brilliant emerald thread. The outfit reminded Seneca of the way that Saccharine dressed, she thought that it was something that he would wear.

 _Always such a smart young man._ She thought with a sarcastic and girlish passive aggression.

The second man's face bore heavy lidded eyes and an emaciated and hollow set of cheeks that seemed to pay homage to Bellatrix Lestrange's gaunt features, but his more rugged and male face belonged to someone unknown to her. This one had managed to avoid the wanted posters. He paid her very little attention.

The third and most interesting man stood in the centre of the triangle that Selwyn, Seneca and the second man marked the points of, he was equidistant from all three of them but he'd evidently been engaged in convocation with Selwyn before her arrival had interrupted him. He'd turned his head to her as soon as soon as she had opened the door and he'd dropped his gesticulating arm as the verbal exchange between him and Selwyn had been severed by her intrusion.

This third man was the tallest of the three, his smooth Caucasian face was ageless and wore a mildly amused or politely interested face permanently. He had shining blond hair that he slicked neatly back casually, avoiding that creepy legion of segregated strands that some people chose to slick their hair back in. He had a very strong jawline and cheekbones, he obviously originated from good breeding.

His masculine but sensitive face was altered, if that was the right word, by a small inch-long and not unattractive scar that curled in a thin colourless _'C'_ from one corner of his red gently bowed lips to a small way up his cheek. It was no gaudy healed slash but an oddly elegant thin addition to his handsome face. The scar was just a hint of roguishness on a clean-shaven, clean-cut looking man, he looked like he was constantly smiling because of it's fascinating position of his face. His gaze was commanding and wise without taking on the aged sage-like quality that it could have done if he'd been twenty years older. He was undeniably attractive with deep-set and adequately spaced amber eyes that seemed to be flecked with gold and framed with tan-brown rings around his irises.

He was very spruce and well-dressed, his clothes were obviously and unashamedly expensive, however they remained tactfully devoid of the vulgarity which came with the overindulgence of men with more money than style. He wore a set of undoubtedly handmade polished black shoes, not made for the labouring man, and a perfectly tailored onyx-black suit with an ivory-white tie that perfectly matched his un-creased shirt.

She looked at this third man, whose presence seemed to dominate the room; he detracted from the others as if he was naturally stationed above them. A warm smile disturbed the tranquillity of his balanced face, revealing two rows of perfectly set white teeth.

'You must be Miss Sade.' He presumed warmly from across the room elegantly, he had feline grace that was understated.

'Call me Seneca.' She replied, taken aback by him and quickly adapting to match his warm receiving tone. She didn't exactly know what she'd been expecting, but a pleasant greeting from a handsome and debonair man hadn't been it.

'Forgive me, Seneca – of course.' He smiled, making his away across the clawed floor to kiss her on both cheeks in the European _faire la bise_ manner. 'But look at you – trouble with the rain, I see.' He said warmly between the two phrases of his greeting on each cheek.

 _A polite man or a sycophant?_ She wondered as she returned his gesture, feeling her lower lip brush the delicate indent of his facial scar. They ended the greeting and she replied.

'Well, the rain it–'

'Raineth every day.' He interjected, finishing her Shakespearean quote. 'How did you find _Twelfth Nigh_ t?' He asked, flashing a small educated smile that she'd seen in the Ravenclaws. She was impressed by his knowledge of something so muggle-centric, but before she could answer he seemed to catch himself. 'Where are my manners?' He continued in a purring voice. 'My name is Varian Pyrites. This is Selwyn and Gibbon.' He gestured genially to the two Death Eaters who flanked him. 'Apologies for the vague signage on the door, but your initials are so very common.' He laughed. 'Not to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but I can't help to notice a certain serpentine sibilance in so many names.' He spoke in a confident voice of a city worker and recited a little list. 'Silas Saccharine, such a charming boy; Sylvester Selwyn;' He gestured again behind him. 'Salazar Slytherin of course, and then you, Seneca Sade. Why so many _'S's_?' He looked at her very seriously and she struggled for an answer. 'Oh, and Severus Snape.' He added as an afterthought while she considered the question.

' _'_ _S'_ like the hiss of a snake – for our house's animal, maybe it attracts Slytherin parents.' She said after a moment.

'Perhaps… but _our house_?' He mused. 'Maybe yours, but definitely not mine.' Pyrites laughed. Seneca took a second to understand, the question had thrown her off.

'You weren't a Slytherin?' She asked, trying to keep the disorientation brought on by the surreal current situation out of her voice.

 _Full of surprises, this one._ She thought to herself, she couldn't quite tell if Pyrites was mocking her with his fawning nature or was genuinely a pleasant person. He beckoned her over to a small round table that served as the only furnishing in the hollow room and pulled a chair out for her politely. She thanked him over her shoulder as she sat down. The table was covered with a pristine white tablecloth; on it, a vase filled with slightly wilted purple columbines and dying indigo lupines stood, filled half way with faintly off looking water. He answered as he sat opposite her, his face bathed the red light.

'No, I was not. But I'll forgive your assumption.' He smiled again. 'I was a Ravenclaw; intelligence and cunning are very much linked.' He undid the button of his suit jacket as he adjusted his posture in his seat in accordance to etiquette. She knew it had to be Ravenclaw if not Slytherin, from the way he carried himself it seemed so clear now.

She was wary of Ravenclaws, anyone who excelled in academia so much that it defined their house was either smothering their unsolvable life problems with solvable Arithmancy equations or far cleverer than she was, both of which warranted her to be on guard.

'Did you know my mother, then?' Seneca asked, keeping the exchange convocational.

'Perhaps, what was her name?' He replied, politely interested.

'Shiloh Sade, my father gave me her maiden name after she died.' She answered watching him betray a hint of recognition with a mannerism-like twitching squint of his amber eyes.

'I recall her, yes.' Pyrites replied a note of genuine interest in his voice. 'You look very like her, you know? I thought you looked familiar, I can see where you get your good looks from. A splendid potions maker if I'm remembering correctly; never got the recognition she deserved – old Slughorn was too busy fawning over Severus in our class.' He paused to give her a gentle look. 'I had no idea she'd passed away, you have my deepest condolences, how did it happen?' He asked tenderly as he touched her left hand that rested on the table with his right. She noticed that he wore a pair of soft white leather gloves.

'Thank you, Varian, you're too kind. She died in childbirth – giving her life for mine, I suppose.' She paused, aware that the convocation was revealing a lot more about her than it was about him. 'Another _'S.S.'_ , though.' She smiled, redirecting the convocation back to a more comfortable place.

'Oh, you mustn't blame yourself, Seneca.' He said and sensed that she was uncomfortable. 'Indeed, another _'S.S.'_.' He broke into another friendly smile which faded naturally. 'Shiloh. Is that a Jewish name, I've always wondered?' He asked carefully. Seneca was impressed by his knowledge of something so non-magical but quickly realised what he was surreptitiously asking was: _Does your family have Muggle roots?_ Religion was not particularly practiced in the Wizarding World, they preferred tradition, legends and superstitions.

'Semitic perhaps, but we have no blood in us that is based in Jewish stock.' She replied tactfully, what she'd said was true; she'd started playing his game of double-meanings and was trying to answer both his questions as he had asked them. She almost smiled at the irony of this convocation; she started to notice similarities between the Nazi Party in the Muggle world and the Death Eaters in this one, something that had not occurred to her before now and something that Pyrites was probably completely oblivious to.

'I see.' He seemed satisfied. 'But come now, you didn't come here to exchange pleasantries with an old friend of your mothers, now did you? Let's get down to it, shall we?' His warm rhetorical questions and gentle convocation had put Seneca in a relaxed and included frame of mind, but a direct address of the darker reason that she was talking to him in the first place was a little abrupt and jarring. She looked up at the two Death Eaters that stood adjacent to Pyrites and suddenly felt a little more threatened. Pyrites, however, remained sanguine. She nodded in response, fearing that speaking would betray her fear with a waver or a hoarseness in her words. He smiled and reached into his blazer's inside breast pocket to retrieve a shallow silver case which he opened gently and placed on the table cloth between them 'Would you care for a cigarette?' He asked.

'Thank you.' She replied in way of an answer, smiling affably and taking one from the case. Pyrites copied.

'Unfiltered, I hope you don't mind.' He added in an oddly saccharine tone. Seneca didn't mind at all.

'That's fine. I've never know a wizard to smoke before.' She said, softly laughing through her nose as she put it the cigarette between her lips, being careful not to smudge her lipstick.

'Oh, well I spent a number of years as an Obliviator after the Dark Lord fell—I accompanied him to the Potters' that night—frightful event that was.' He side-tracked, recognised his parenthesis and back-tracked. 'I digress and this is a boring story, but in short, I worked with the Ministry after everything came down and was sent to obliviate groups that were causing particular unrest for our lot. They were mostly cults of religious fanatics, conspiracy theorists and the like that had seen something magical that had unhinged them a bit. For one of my longer assignments, I got tasked with infiltrating and obliviating a group of bankers down in Central London who'd started some sort of secret society worshiping a careless Auror they saw fighting off a werewolf. You know how these Muggles are?' He chortled condescendingly. 'I was there for a long time, you see? One of the side effects was I ended up picking up this bad habit.' He smiled and reached into his pocket for a Zippo which he lit her cigarette with and then his own. 'I used to use my wand to light these with but after a few burns I reverted to these little things.' he smiled and took a drag. Exhaling through his nose, he continued again. 'Fascinating what these Muggles think up without magic, isn't it?' He concluded behind a haze of rising silvery-blue cigarette smoke that resembled the discharge from her wand when trying to summon a Patronus.

'Quite.' She responded phlegmatically and took her first drag, the head-rush of nicotine coming on strong due to her not smoking in term time. The only students that smoked on Hogwarts' grounds were a small group of black turtle-necked sweater wearing Muggle-born Ravenclaws who fancy themselves as Nihilist Philosophers and edgy free thinkers. She detested their Black Panther t-shirts, feigned homosexuality and mulatto parenthood. Maybe this was because she saw something of herself in those people. Like them she conformed to some sort of sexual deviancy and like them she was half-blood just as they were half-bred in the eyes of both their worlds' racists. _Métis._ Her thoughts returned to Pyrites.

 _The Ministry really did a number on you._ She thought, she'd never thought she'd hear a Death Eater praise the ingenuity of Muggles. She looked around the room, considering what to say next and noticed the glinting orange bastions of her and Pyrites' cigarettes that stood out of sea of red soaked pastel colours. Like the cigarette ends, the emerald thread of Gibbon's jacket and the fading colours of the columbines and lupines rejected the blanket of bloody coloured light that the candles provided once shone through the red tinted glass of their holders.

'Managed to avoid Azkaban, then?' She asked after a slightly too drawn out pause, realising that she had created an awkward silence in the convocation. He looked away from her as she said this, his white gloved fingers pressed to his lips as he took another drag.

'Well.' He said choked out a single dry cough of a laugh. His smile remained but it twitched, he was forcing it now. 'Not exactly.' Behind him, Selwyn looked to Gibbon with a half-smile.

'Didn't quite manage to get the _'under the influence of the Imperious Curse'_ story to stick?' She joked tastelessly.

'No.' Pyrites seemed to be answering the rhetorical question very seriously for a moment. 'I didn't try that one.' He looked into Seneca's eyes very sombrely. 'I was arrested very soon after everything came down around us all, I agreed to name my fellow Death Eaters in return for leniency after spending a little time in Azkaban.' He finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the white table cloth unceremoniously. 'It worked. I named Igor Karkaroff, who in turn followed my example and named Antonin Dolohov, Evan Rosier, Jubal Travers, Claudius Mulciber, Severus Snape and Augustus Rookwood.' Each name he uttered slowly, their first and last names spoken in turn like a bad ritualistic prayer as if he were in repentance. His tone never wavered from convocational; however, Seneca could sense the importance of his words.

She finished her cigarette and snubbed its lipstick smeared end on the table cloth like Pyrites had done. She looked back at him and waited for him to continue.

'The Dark Lord does not forgive easily. Look what happened to poor Igor' He said, his clear and smooth voice breaking almost undetectably for the first time. Under the table he seemed to be doing something. Seneca felt uncomfortable all of a sudden and her hand reached for her wand slowly. The hard ebony throbbed against her outer thigh.

'Most of them had been dealt with already, save for Augustus, but it was the act of betrayal that counted.' Pyrites stopped fumbling with whatever it was he was doing under the table. 'Do you know why I wear these gloves, Seneca?' He asked softly, almost whispering. She unconsciously leant closer to hear him.

'No.' She replied truthfully. 'Why?'

'I'll show you why… but you have to promise not to scream. I can't stand that noise, I've done too much of it myself.' He said, his voice was inflected with intended humour but she didn't laugh. She consented non-verbally by passively leaning back in her chair.

Slowly and genially, Pyrites brought his steady hands back from under the table. Seneca jumped when she saw them, her arm knocking the vase of flowers off of the table, shattering it on the floor. She'd risen too quickly to her feet and she'd caught her foot on the chair leg, causing her to trip and fall awkwardly onto the splintered floorboards. Selwyn ran to her quickly to pull her up while Gibbon fixed the vase lazily, making it fall in reverse back to the table, just as the moth jar had done earlier in Snape's dark little office.

She opened her mouth to scream but Selwyn clamped it hard with his calloused hand. Pyrites thanked him with a desperately reserved look. She struggled a little before relaxing in Selwyn's arms, calming down slightly as she adjusted to what she looked at. He released her slowly and cautiously as if he wasn't sure if she was going to try and scream again. But she just stood horrified and silent, staring at his hands that were now purposefully laid on the ash-spotted table cloth.

from the wrists downwards, his hands were stripped of their skin, so that the bare flesh lay exposed. They had been completely flayed of epidermis or membrane. His neatly maintained nails were still present however, and they grew from a fold in the sinewy muscle at the ends of his fingers.

'This one is for naming Karkaroff.' He said moving his red right hand and showing the usually hidden muscles flexing. He twitched the other in turn. 'And this is for not returning with the others when he came back.' He said conversationally. Seneca was transfixed by the sight of them. The raw flesh glistened and looked wet but Pyrites spoke as if he'd had them for a long time. 'Severus made a trade with the Dark Lord. One ability for another, a gift for a gift. A show of good will upon their reunification. Snape gave _'Sectumsempra'_ to him and in return he gained broomless flight.' Seneca listened as she watched his hands in repulsion. She picked her chair up and slowly sat back down, her eyes not moving from his red hands. 'Dark Magic never heals.' He continued in a soft tone. 'The Dark Lord used Snape's curse with such accuracy.' His calm voice lacked benevolence but did not contain any negativity.

 _'_ _Sectumsempra?'_ she asked, trying to recall curses that Snape had taught her. 'He never showed me that one.' She said absentmindedly, pulling her eyes away from his hands. It didn't register to Seneca until Pyrites tugged at his white shirt sleeves to cover his naked wrist flesh, as if they were an indecency, that Pyrites wore vermilion cufflinks that matched the colour of his bloody hand meat ironically very well. She would have laughed at this had she not been so repulsed. She wondered if he'd done this intentionally; perhaps his dapper tendencies were a compulsive thing, or maybe he just had a good sense of humour.

'It isn't Ministry approved. A little something, he came up with it at school. It's a nasty piece of work – doesn't require any talent to cast once you know the incantation.' Pyrites explained and lifted his hands from the table revealing that they had left a pinkish stain on the table cloth where they had been placed.

'This spell… It skins you alive or something?' Seneca asked, a nausea overcoming her as she looked at the weeping underside of Pyrites' hands as he carefully pulled his white leather gloves back over them.

'No.' He said with a dry laugh. 'No, it causes wounds that never heal, the Dark Lord just used it this way, I don't think that Severus ever thought of using it that way.' Pyrites' tone never wavered into anything beyond mildly fazed.

'Do they hurt?' She asked staring at Pyrites' now gloved right thumb as it softly rubbed the little smiling scar on his face.

'Unbelievably.' He replied. 'Do you understand why I've shown you this, Seneca?' He looked at her very seriously, his statement pregnant, making sure that his warm amber eyes looked into her cold blue ones before continuing. 'This organisation is very serious. Betrayal is not something that is tolerated or goes unpunished, the Dark Lord does not forgive easily.' He smoothed his sun-streaked golden hair with his gloved hand. 'If you decide to do this, it has to be because you legitimately believe in our cause.' He leant in, steepling his gloved hands in an engaged but reserved display of body language. Seneca watched him warily. She didn't know what to say.

'I do.' She said without any emotion after a long pause.

'There's no shame in walking away now.' Pyrites said. 'Nothing wrong with that.'

'No. Varian, I want to do this.' She replied to his reassuring comments coldly. Pyrites studied her for a moment, the red light casting a sanguine glow in his amber eyes.

'Then give me your arm.' He said quietly after a moment. Seneca lay her left hand on the table, uncomfortably arching her wrist as to not touch the pink watery stain on the cloth.

Pyrites drew his wand from a pocket stitched into his blazer's inner fabric. It was almost fifteen inches and very thin ornately carved and beautiful wand made of an extremely pale white wood with tasteful ivory accenting and detailing on the handle. Seneca thought it was the most beautiful wand she had ever seen. He caught her looking at it. 'It's American Holly – the wood, I mean – the core is Veela hair.' He smiled softly. 'They're strong but temperamental wands, tend to change hands quite easily – don't have any loyalty.'

'It's beautiful.' Seneca said transfixed by its handsome aesthetic.

'Is it?' He asked wearily. 'Do you know what happens to a Veela when you pluck a hair from its graceful head?' He asked slowly.

'No.'

'They die.' Pyrites said. 'They wilt away, get older and older before your eyes… and then they die.' He took a long pause. 'It means that my wand was forged through the maiming of such beauty – from the death of a beautiful creature.' He said very solemnly. 'This thing…' He gestured to the wand with his gloved free hand. 'This is not beautiful; it is a weapon, a disfigurement of a shimmering creature to be utilised in the formation of a base wizard's aid, a blunt tool, an instrument for the killing fields.' He stopped himself and returned his attention back to Seneca's bare left arm.

'That's horrible.' Seneca whispered, looking at the long white wand. Pyrites didn't answer; however, the air did not seem pregnant with the silence of an awkward gap in the convocation, but it instead, it seemed that all that needed to be said had been said.

'I'll mark you as an initiate. After your trial, I'll imbue you with the Mark – If you pass, that is.' Pyrites' sharp wand tip pricked Seneca's forearm slightly as he pushed against it.

'What's the trial?' Seneca asked, worry in her voice, Pyrites hadn't mentioned any test. He took his wand point from her arm, interrupted.

'We'll take you somewhere to test your nerve and see if you can handle the sort of work we'll need you for. You're not a snatcher or a foot-soldier, Seneca. If you go through with this, you'll have to be more than a brute or a sadist. We need to see what you're made of.'

'What was Saccharine's then?' She asked softly, his name seemed to almost taste strange and bitter in her mouth. Pyrites looked a little guarded at this question, while Selwyn behind him broke into an almost hysterical grin suddenly, it was unsettling like those illustrations of the Cheshire Cat that appeared in Seneca's childhood nightmares.

'Silas committed an act in preparation for our meeting.' Pyrites said slowly but without wavering. Seneca hated the sound of Saccharine's first name; it was so slippery and that it seemed to lie supine on the ground and slither like a snake, that sibilance was so disgusting in his painfully drawn out name. 'He apparated us to the scene of his crime and we swore him in right there in the bloody room we landed in. I suppose you'll hear about it in the _Prophet_ – a very creative boy, his talents would translate well into art if he found the time.' He added as an aside, presumably referring to Saccharine's undoubtable ingenious cruelty; she couldn't imagine him shying from an opportunity to show his sadistic streak.

Pyrites looked weary and Seneca resigned the line of questioning, laying her arm on the table again and giving in to it resting on the pinkish stain, it felt wet and pussy on the back of her hand. His gloved hand touched her tenderly as he pricked her with his sharp wand again. He began the incantation.


	6. Chapter V

_V: Maelstrom_

Pyrites' wand lifted from Seneca's arm. Set there, a black tattoo contrasted strongly against her almost unnaturally white skin. It was a depiction of the letter 'I', styled in lower-case in a typewriter-type font, like the logo from an information bureau, although this resemblance was most likely unintentional on the Death Eaters' part. He looked at his work, contented. It was well formed but had no sense of nuance, no detailing, delicate elements or refined aspects. It was simply one unmoving letter like a cattle brand on her skin. It was almost distasteful in Seneca's eyes and she'd thought she would feel more bothered by the permanence of it but oddly she wasn't, something about her bodily alteration seemed reasonable; a small price to pay, almost. She was uncharacteristically unfazed by it. Pyrites looked to her and spoke softly, his features still bathed in that sanguine glow.

'I'll set the Dark Mark over your initiate tattoo when we return.' He indicated with his wand in a rolling gesture of the wrist. The mannerism was convivial.

'From where?' She asked, looking from the tattoo into his pale eyes. They were hooded and Delphic but not in any oracular capacity. As she tried to glean from them, he looked away, back to her tattoo.

'Well…' His voice, disconnected from that sombre flicker of the eye, drew the word out playfully and smiled. 'I can't disclose the location of your trial seeing as it might be an aid to your preparation for the task.' He resisted in a mock-dogmatic drone, facetiousness dripped from a silver tongue. She pretended to laugh through her nose in an attempt to mask her fear of whatever ominous undertaking Pyrites had prepared for her. She saw now how clever Saccharine had been to commit an act on his own terms, where he had not been on the back foot and which he undoubtedly explained in a manner that masked his caution with an eagerness.

Pyrites stood up quite unexpectedly but none the less graceful than usual. He removed his black suit jacket, hanging it over the back of the featureless chair that he'd sat on. Rolling up his pressed white shirtsleeves and removing his blood-red cufflinks, putting them into his trouser pockets. He revealed his arms, slender and lean, devoid of any hyper-masculine resemblance to the hirsute simian that she found so revolting. Seneca watched his tattooed Dark Mark that moved gently on his lightly tanned arm. On Saccharine's unpleasant limb, the black serpent had writhed and slithered on his flesh as if restless and anxious to be on his skin. On Pyrites' arm, however, the snake coiled with watchful yet docile eyes, flicking its tongue slowly and measuredly retreating into the refuge of the skull that it was paired with. It looked strangely contented.

Her attention was taken by his white leather gloves that looked so strange when not coupled with sleeves, as if he was a cartoon character. He smoothed his hair and undid his perfect ivory tie and hung it over the chair on top of the black jacket. Undoing his top button and retrieving his long white wand from the table, he would have looked almost saturnine had it not been for his smiling scar. He walked around the table to face her and she fully appreciated his tall stature, something she'd overlooked on their peculiar introduction.

'Seneca, I want you to listen to me very carefully. The place that I'm about to take you may be very dangerous; not just physically but psychologically. Do you understand that? You have to be prepared before we depart.' He said very seriously, a gloved hand on her shoulder.

'I understand.' She replied, a little too mechanically. He nodded very slowly to her in solemn appreciation of her acceptance; his amber eyes were downcast. He looked back at Selwyn and Gibbon who had remained in the same positions, more or less, from Seneca's initial arrival and interjection. Having exchanged confirmatory glances with the two, he took a moment to compose his attire and he brushed imaginary lint from his collar. He outstretched his arm and paused looking her in the eyes. She did not hold his look in contempt, a consensual and silent nod was traded.

Pyrites' gloved hand closed hard around Seneca's wrist and the swirling pull of disapparition overtook her. Everything happened extremely fast. She felt as if an invisible needle had pierced her navel and curled inside of her, yanking her forward before she and Pyrites were inseparably forced through an unseen tube. They arrived a second later, apparating back onto materiality uncomfortably in some far off ambiguous location.

Seneca's boots slopped into muddy sludge. Rain burnt her face in sharp, prickling, torrential waves; Pyrites having to prop her up as her ankle turned in on itself, making her combat boot slip in the soft ground underfoot. She was disorientated and dazed, a sense of fright set in almost at once. An explosion of sentience overcame her; a nauseating, vaporous fog of shear panic. Selwyn and Gibbon apparated beside them and dissolved into their nocturnal surroundings: wands in hand.

What met them was a screaming frenzy of swirling, multi-coloured chaos, superimposed over the pitch blackness of the night sky. They'd apparated into a battle-zone. Violent, schizophrenic colours exploded in feverish, kaleidoscopic displays in front of them; it took a great mental leap to discern that they were the haunting lights of spells. In combat around them, men and women swarmed over each other in a seemingly random dance of wand actions and exertion and heinous violence. They churned in a hideous mass devoid of reason or lustre, only a driving, singular knowledge that their adversary was their nemesis. Seneca couldn't tell friend form foe in the blood-lit broil. The ancient and scarred earth shuddered from deafening impacts and destructive blasts. Overhead, a cacophony punished her new arrival. In the wasteland rain and mud, delicate Latin incantations were diluted in the ears with the overpowering noises of suffering.

Seneca seemed to come out of a momentary daze, the blooming spell impacts and streaks from wands left smearing neon blotches on her retinas. They had a narcotic effect on her. She looked around for Pyrites but he'd disappeared into the mass of technicolour, zigzagging crossfire. She fumbled with the waistband of her trousers for her wand and gripping it, she swung in an arc, reacting to the sounds of the hellish mêlée as the lights were blinding her.

Beginning to attune to her surroundings, she distinguished a hideous buzzing coming from the sky over the roaring, chaotic miasma of duellists around her. The sound was like the buzzing of a fat insect stuck in her inner ear. She looked up; the battle was three-dimensional; above them, silhouetted against the ethereal crescent-moon, a swirling mass of broom-mounted combatants churned and swarmed in the air. Spiralling Quidditch team formations flew in line against a wave of uncoordinated, swarming wasp-like opposition. Seneca was watching a vision of the inferno unfurling; pure and unparalleled terror coursed through her veins and throbbed in her temples. She had never witnessed magic being used for such destruction before. Around her, men and women were struck down prone, supine or sprawling into the bloody mud with a nonchalance—there wasn't a moment where she witnessed her first man die, instead she watched those who fell get struck down in droves.

Directly in front of her, not more than half a meter away, she saw one close up. A Death Eater made a slashing movement with his wand that undid an Auror from breastbone to left eye, spraying her with blood. She opened her mouth to scream as the Auror reeled backwards but found that she couldn't. Unlike her, the Auror found his voice and he sobbed a hoarse wail as he fell into the cold mud, his hands clasped over the ruin of his eye, which had split and ran like white water through the gaps in his fingers. The Auror's wand lay, half-submerged in the mud and the Death Eater shattered it with a nonverbal spell. The Death Eater pointed his wand at Seneca next, the wind tearing at his hood enough for her to identify him from the wanted posters as Rowle. His close-cropped blond hair and wide set eyes gave him away. She held her exposed left arm up dumbly as she staggered back. His cloaked face, half concealed by shadow, turned to her upturned arm and seeing the lower case 'I' that was set there, shoved her hard in the shoulder.

'Fight, you coward!' His harsh voice was barely perceptible over the din but his words brought her back to reality once more as she faded in and out of shock, unable to move. The Death Eater had already vanished, methodically moving on to his next engagement. Seneca wasn't even sure he had been there in the first place. What was real and what was inside her head mingled in the otherworldly clash, she could smell the iron of blood and the brimstone of magic around her, it was intoxicating her with fear. She thought suddenly of the son of the godlike Achilles, adolescent Neoptolemus, soaked in the lifeblood of Priam and his children. His serpentine face seemed to loom unto her, how she'd always imagined him: sculptural and violent; and she felt the pull of his mythical psychopathy, the strength in his insanity and then he was before her, spectral and untouched by the battle, the translucent turquoise of his transparent form seemed to strip her naked before his cold eyes.

 _'_ _Fight, you coward!'_ His ghastly scream was echoing and washed-out with distance, distorted by the vail of her imagination, through which he was projected. His ghostly apparition dematerialised and she forgot she even cast him from her mind's eye.

Her wand, that she clenched with white knuckled terror, seemed to throb in her burning wet palm. Her delirious cowardice consumed her completely. The rain was horrendous, the cold worse, she was soaked to the bone. Her muggle clothes stuck to her like sections of peeling skin. She narrowly escaped collision with a broom-mounted witch who arced low over the field, streaking past her, only to be struck out of the air by a killing curse meant for another ground-level fighter. The air and ground battles blurred together in places, warlocks and witches fought both airborne and grounded combatants simultaneously.

As the duelling mass of close quarters fighters randomly evolved in shape leaving anti-space and openings sporadically, a channel seemed to open through the torrent of black and beige shrouded figures. For a second, Seneca looked straight down it and locked eyes with the haunted face of a haggard and gnarled Auror. He made for her without hesitation through the crowd of partnered duellists. His face was that of a mauling dog: dreadful and murderous, she thought of Maugrim, Smaug, the bestial malign beings of her childhood, Lovecraft's Haunter, unleashed by the Trapezohedron. His long brown leather trench coat billowed with the gale-force winds, so that he looked to be a wraith, fiendlike enough to be an animal, he raised his wand in his white-gloved left hand like some parody of a prestidigitator as he scrambled over the muddy ground towards her, he too was feverish with the illness of battle. She raised her own wand in defence, backing up hard until she was knocked by some anonymous shoulder behind her. He stalled for a moment, catching his foot on the now silent face of the blown-open Auror. Seneca had a clear line on him. While he unsnagged his boot, she channelled her anger and fear into her pool of magic. There was no decision in it, just the instant defence of murder.

 _'_ _Confringo!'_ Her voice was brittle-sounding, like a crow's and a mere whisper in the cacophony. The orange bloom of flames that jumped to meet her target was spurred on by her fear and terror. It flew true in a dreadful fiery arc and struck him dead in the chest, melting away his clothes and horribly burning him as he was immersed in the unnatural yellow-glowing flames. He screamed shrilly as he thrashed in the mud, trying to tear his liquefied, scalding leather coat from himself. For a second, she looked on wide-eyed, she saw what she had inflicted, before he was obscured by the constantly in-motion crowd of people, his body providing a burning beacon that some rallied around for consistent visibility not offered by the jarring bursts of wand light.

The golden glow of the flames casted those who fought and died in front of it into beautiful profiled silhouettes and drew their leaping shadows long across the muddy ground.

And then, like a storm that suddenly whips up over a sea, _he_ broke the violent stalemate.

Voldemort.

The Dark Lord apparated in a black swirl of shadowy robes about ten meters away from where Seneca stood. A serpentine wraith, superimposed over the synthetically opalescent sky. He was no man, no mere meat puppet but an unnatural incarnation of the Archfiend, the highermost evil. He hovered motionless, his arms outstretched like a mockery of the Crucifixion or in an intimidating assertive stance, about a foot from the mud as if his feet of low Abaddon could not be stained by the obscenity of the silted mud that the baser men writhed in. He was an ungodly deity, a wrathful seraph of death. His wand, the anointed rapier of his malice, was delicately balanced in his discoloured tallow right hand of Apollyon.

The battlefield held fast in terror as the Dark Lord, the silver snake, coiled to strike. He hung in the air as Marlow's Mephistopheles—nay, the bastard Beelzebub, the despoiler. He exercised his supernatural might. With one fell arc of his wretched arm he devoured the line of routed Auror's who met him in a hateful sea of deep purple flame. It raged only for an instant and left nothing in its wake. He pointed his white hand in one dreadful motion and he non-verbally struck down his next opponents with a storm of invisible dark magic. He was a vengeful spirit among men, he maneuvered the battle-zone as if it were his dominion, leaving only misshapen bodies behind him. He was doom and he was death, the Dark Lord held within his ivory hand the power to raze and dominate all life. The hording black mass of his followers rallied to him with haste like a vaporous, smoky plume of mist as his inner circle apparated around him, their swirling aspects caught in the later, reappearing phase of teleportation, giving them the impression of monstrous, inky raindrops—dark interpolations amongst the omnipresent tempest.

Seneca fell back in horrified awe; nothing could have prepared her for his dreadful visage. She could not bear to look upon his malicious form. When he cast his cold and silent gaze over the fleeing Aurors and grazed her with his raping crimson-slit eyes, she cowered in the mud, her face forced into the stinging liquid-earth, such was her fear. She knew now how none that had seen his works could bring themselves to speak his vile name.

He raised his wand into the air, the raging air-battle had subsided, the Aurors dispersing as soon as they caught a glimpse of his power and he cast the Dark Mark silently before vanishing again into the rain. He had graced the field of battle for a single terrible moment and had crushed all who stood against him. None yet stood to face him.

Seneca trembled there, in the acidic blood-stained mud, her world was burred spell impacts and frozen nerves. She was disorientated, cowering from the freezing rain between and under the bodies of the fallen combatants around her. She drifted in and out of awareness, unsure for how long, too afraid to open her eyes.

There were sounds like whips cracking all around her in the distance; the remaining fighters were fleeing or escaping—cowardly disapparating. There were the occasional sounds of far off running and screaming coupled with the trudging of feet and sounds like flare guns being fired as random spells were discharged; she didn't know how much of the surrounding area had been consumed by the fray but the battle had seemed to be endless when they'd initially apparated into the brutalising darkness. The sounds of trudging seemed to get closer to her and she coiled into the foetal position, recoiling from the possibility of hostile interaction, or any exposure to anything at all, she couldn't take it. Her body seemed to atrophy and waste around her ghost in the primordial earth. Her mind's eye hung unblinking and lidless over the ultraviolent scenes she'd witnessed—they were stripped naked and bare for what they were before her horrified and transfixed mental gaze. Primal savagery, preformed with a more refined instrument of cruelty: a wand. Pyrites' had been right to despair at her naïve love for his wand's pleasing aesthetic. It was a tool, a shallow utensil of violence—just as he'd said. A lens through which you channel your malice. Like a projector that showed slides of brutality and the deepest recesses of the human nature and cognition and she thought again of Mr. Kurtz and his final words. _The horror_. She understood. Seneca zoned back into fearful consciousness at the sounds of movement in close proximity.

'There's one alive over there! Under the Dark Mark, under the bodies!' A strange voice, harsh and rough like a carrion bird's cry rang out from the murmuring of vague movement.

'I see it—a girl!' Another voice called back with a foreign accent, Eastern European perhaps but alien to her. This time the voice was much closer to her and hoarse.

The sounds of slopping mud loudened as someone approached through the dense ground. A thick hand wrapped her mud-soaked hair around its simian fist and wrenched her from the bloody sludge. She was yanked from it, thrashing weakly as if she was prematurely and unnaturally birthed from the mud like a caesarean. She knocked the bodies around her coldly as if she jostled them in a horizontal crowd.

Seneca screamed but was too weak to struggle to any meaningful extent. Her eyes opened as she gasped for breath. She croaked inaudibly, like she was trying to scream in a nightmare, her voice coming out as if she'd lost it. His other hand coarsely tugged at her waistband of her jeans trying to undo them and she panicked suddenly adrenaline flooding her addled mind as she came to the realisation of the potential situation, feeling his calloused fingers touch brush her mons pubis and try and push his big hand further down to stab into her vulvar slit, she wriggled weakly and clamped her legs together in an attempt to close her thigh-gap. The hard rain made both of them slippery and his hold on her was thusly temperamental, she kicked backward and felt the hard connection of her combat boot's heel with his shin. He was unfazed.

'Inish—' She moaned through a thick-feeling throat as he yanked her hair, making her scalp sear with pain. 'Initiate!' She managed, crying. His hand stopped trying to push into her underwear and instead grabbed her wrist. He must have seen her tattoo because he dropped her immediately, swearing.

'Shit.' He breathed and then called back to his companion. 'It's one of ours!' She heard the sounds of running through the slop. His partner was closing on her.

He pulled her up again, this time slightly more gently and gripped her by the small of her back and nape of her neck so that she didn't collapse. Her eyes adjusted for a moment, his face came out of blurred obscurity, bathed in the cold green light from the glittering Dark Mark set overhead. He looked Slavic, all shaven head and broad shoulders, wide spaced eyes and a flat nose, he was ugly and looked cobbled together, his features had no nuance. He was a beast, an animal. Sudden rage was upon her.

 _Fucking Subhuman! White nigger!_

She scrambled in the mud trying to escape his grip and when he tightened it she spat savagely into his face. In retaliation, he punched her hard across the jaw, making her sprawl back into the mud and splutter a mouthful of blood. Her hair was in her eyes, bloody water streaked her pounding face but she found her wand and drew it fast, pointing it in the direction she fell from.

 _Crucio!_ She cast non-verbally, surprising herself. A flash of red light occupied her limited vision and a lurid scream seemed to split her ears and then die out as he writhed in the mud.

'Fucking bitch!' He shouted hoarsely.

'Animal!' She growled back through her blood-filled mouth and clenched her chattering teeth. The sound of the assailant's companion's approaching reached a zenith vicinal to her, he stopped running and she saw his vague green-lit face for a second become more vivid. It was Selwyn. She went limp with relief at this half-familiarity, this vague recognition was enough. She felt so faint, so scared still. The conformation of familiarity brought on by Selwyn's appearance seemed to sap her of her adrenaline, she returned to that fugue state of drifting in and out of consciousness.

She hadn't recognised his voice as she'd assumed she would, not remembering how he and Gibbon had stood in silence while her and Pyrites talked so extensively. He pulled her up by the arm and supported her, helping her to stand. He looked very different, worn out and haggard; his long overcoat was slashed and covered in scorch marks, his hair had been long untied from his handsome bow and fell in rain-matted sheets around his witch-like face. Selwyn spoke to the cursed man in the mud, shouting slightly over the pelting rain as Seneca blacked out for a moment and shuddered back to consciousness.

'This one belongs to Pyrites.' He looked back at Seneca, she unconsciously held her arms over the crotch of her jeans as she shivered. Selwyn glanced at them for a second. 'Did you do something to her, Goran?' Selwyn sneered down at the wretched Slav. He didn't reply, his eyes darted between Selwyn's and Seneca's. 'You're disgusting.' Selwyn said with distain. 'You better get back to Goyle or Yaxley before their divisions leave without you.' He said with distaste; the Slavic man, Goran, groaned as he pulled himself up. Selwyn helped Seneca to stand and began to manoeuvre the battle-ground supporting her as he did so, Goran squelching through the slop in the opposite direction. The wind still burnt and the rain was still horrendous. Selwyn's feet sunk into the ground at least half a foot in some places. She tuned into her surroundings for a moment, in between bouts of blackouts.

The battle-field reminded her of pictures of the First World War, battles such as the Somme or Verdun bore striking similarities to this distorted landscape. The ground was uneven, massive trenches and fox-holes had been formed, perhaps tactically or perhaps the result of powerful destructive magic. Coils of barbed wire were everywhere, half buried in the sludge, as well as crates stamped with the Ministry of Magic's purple capital 'M'. It seemed that the contingency of Aurors had attempted to get dug in.

The whole scene was bathed in a brilliant emerald glow of the intrusive Dark Mark as if the Aurora Borealis shone over it. The greenish tint was reflected and diffracted in the raindrops and in the muddy puddles and splashes of blood.

They passed strange markers in the bloody mud; a spear, for example, protruded from the wasteland, jutting out of the earth like an alternatively aboriginal Excalibur, autochthonous African carvings of some hoary Negroid culture decorated it. Seneca studied it as she staggered past, it looked so surreally positioned, so misplaced but oddly appropriate like the slanted anamorphic skull in Holbein's _The Ambassadors_. Approached from their angle, the spear's tilt distorted it geometrically, perspective being everything to the viewing of such an unnatural object. She wondered how it had come to be there in the first place. Selwyn ignored it.

Corpses merged with the mud, broken bodies and gory grotesques populated the field. The soft muddy ground offered some modesty in the covering of gaudy wounds and naked skin of stripped bare bodies, Seneca began to see their similarities with animal carcasses the more she looked at the broken humanoid sections of flesh. Selwyn pulled Seneca across the space where the Dark Lord had entered the fray. The liquid mud turned suddenly into scorched and cracked earth from where his curse had burned with such insane and maddening heat. The black-purple flames evaporated the line of Aurors again in her mind and although she could not see in such low visibility, she walked across the blackened carbon imprints that their bodies had made against the ground. The permeant shadows that were all they left behind.

In front of them, a cherry tree stood in the mud; pinkish-white blossoms dappled its pale branches that were torn at by the vicious wind despite it not being the right time of year for it to be flowering. She assumed the tree had been conjured by some combatant but she couldn't see why. The tree looked sickly in the brilliant bile-coloured tint from the emerald Dark Mark and the blossoms were being destroyed by the rain. They staggered onwards so that it came at them through the thick rain-saturated grey air. The closer they came to it, the more eerie it became. She squinted at it, there was something swinging from it, being knocked against the trunk by the howling wind. Something long and red attached by a rope.

Selwyn clamped his hand over her eyes.

'Don't look, Seneca.' He croaked in his crow's voice, she could hear the creaking of the rope over the rain and could smell the sweet scent of the blossoms and metallic blood as they passed under the branches. Selwyn relaxed his arm after they cleared the shadow of the tree and Seneca almost looked back out of instinct but found that she couldn't bring herself to.

Figures were assembled in a close curving ring, constructing an inexorable circle, a phalanx of coal-coloured conjurors in the near distance; the circumference was wide, being made up of many genderless and nameless figures. They were black shrouded and for the most part hooded and mantled, she squinted at the distant coven through the continuous torrential rain. Selwyn led her unto them. As she came closer, it became clear that the circle of figures had been assembled around something at its centre. A person, a captive. She made out the handsomely lithe frame of Pyrites among the circle of warlocks. Selwyn was welcomed amongst them as two generic black-cloaked figures parted to admit him and Seneca.

She could see the prisoner clearly now; he was wounded badly; his grey trench coat was stained with a deep patch of blackish crimson. One of his eyes was swollen purple against his ashen and clammy skin, the lash was crusted with blood. Short slicked back hair was thick with mud. A shredded piece of dirty fabric gagged him. His head was hung as he knelt with his hands bound together behind his back. An Auror to be sure.

Pyrites was standing over him. His tasteful apparel had remained pristine, his dapper susceptibilities remained visibly intact. His manner was still _savoir faire_ without seeming feminine or soft. His white leather gloves provided an exception to this immaculate façade; blood spattered them, seeping into the recesses of the stitching and marring the continuity of their previously unadulterated white sheen. In his bloody hands was a small stapled collection of papers, discolouring before his eyes as the sanguine blood seeped into the paper's absorbent rain spotted edges. He read over this document carefully, occasionally glancing down to hold a moving photograph to the Auror's misshapen face. Seneca assumed these papers were some sort of dossier or identification held by the Auror.

'Adah Gallow? Is that your name?' Pyrites asked softly, the rain had slowed into a drizzling damp and he had no need to raise his voice over its din. The Auror tried to speak through his gag as he nodded. 'Sorry, my manners.' Pyrites smiled and turned to the witch on the left of Selwyn. His eyes glanced over Seneca for a moment but he made no attempt to hold her gaze. 'If you'd be so kind.' Pyrites gestured vaguely with the papers at the captured Auror and the witch undid his gag manually, although Seneca was sure that both her and Pyrites could have done it magically had they so wished. Seneca could see that Pyrites was conveying to the Auror that he was the figure in control by exercising his authority. The Auror was being softened to Pyrites by Pyrites' show of mercy. This much was obvious to her even in her confused state. She considered whether he had used a similar tactic to manipulate her into being marked as an initiate and alleviating her of her doubts.

The Auror spoke in a hushed and beaten tone too soft for Seneca to hear. Pyrites looked down at him. 'Mr. Gallow, please enunciate. Am I referring to you by the right name?' Pyrite was trying to hide a smile, but his scar already made him look less than sombre. He was playing with his food, the Auror's name was obvious and irrelevant. The Auror nodded none the less, his head was hung in exhausted humiliation. Pyrite seemed satisfied with this response. 'And which house did you belong to in school?'—another trivial question.

'Horned Serpent.' He croaked almost inaudibly in a low American accent. Pyrites' face turned to an amused surprise. He laughed.

'You're far from home, Yankee.' He said and smiled the same way he'd smiled at her. The Auror, Mr. Gallow, didn't respond to his comment, Pyrites continued anyway. 'What brought you all the way over here then? It says you're a _'Situational Surveyor'_ here.' He motioned at the dossier. 'What's your function?'

'I'm an emissary from MACUSA. They sent me to evaluate the inevitability of another war.' The Auror said, his head still downcast. Seneca identified his croaking American lilt as Southern but not lower-class.

'They're calling it a war now?' Pyrites dropped into a squatting pose in front of his captive and looked about him, wetting his lower lip impatiently before snapping at him. 'This isn't a war, it's a revolution! We're freedom fighters not terrorists or rivalling powers—we fight for tradition, purity of blood and not to be ashamed of our own existence. We're outnumbered and unfunded; we're volunteers, the only thing we have over the Ministry is our honour. They whore themselves to the Muggles and the Mudbloods!' Pyrite caught himself. His passions had run too close to the surface for him to remain sanguine. His humour had changed very suddenly to choleric, his upper lip was raised almost in a bestial way, his amber eyes were cast quite darkly under the shadow of his frowning brow. They no longer looked pained and cautious like a fox's; now they were that of a wolf, maddened and hungry. He seemed to recover himself very quickly. Some of the circle looked stirred by his statement. 'How long until the Ministry knows we've struck them here.' He said, his eyes were closed warily and he ran his hand through his hair, smoothing it. The American Auror coughed unhealthily and spat into the sludge beneath him. His voice sounded pained and Seneca noticed that his bloody stain had grown.

'Still a few hours yet. It's a long way back to the Ministry, even as the crow flies. Those going by broom will have to fly through the night in bad visibility thanks to your Dementors breading like rabbits.' He croaked uncomfortably. The mention of the Dementors made his voice turn even sourer than it already was. Strangely, Pyrites' face also twitched slightly at this, like he'd been reminded of an annoyance or hindrance. 'The _Prophet_ won't publish anything—don't worry—this kind of a loss is bad for the people's morale. It's all going to be hushed up I think. Like your little ambush in the Shetland Isles.' Seneca had never heard of anything to do with the Shetland Isles before, but then again, his point wouldn't have made sense if she had. Pyrites' responded frankly, any benevolence he could have built between him and his captive had become a potentiality that was now out of the question after his outburst. He had no need to talk eloquently or with any tact.

'You're lying. I saw people apparating out of here when the tide turned in our favour. They're probably reporting what happened to the Minister as we speak.' Pyrites' tone was flat. The American Auror laughed and started to cough.

'They wouldn't have been able to apparate out of Ireland.'

 _Ireland?_ Seneca hadn't considered where she was.

'Why not?' Pyrites said dryly. 'We apparated in.'

'Your lot set up some sort of barrier that splinched us when we tried to escape. I apparated short of it because I don't know the Ministry as well as they did; I couldn't make the whole trip. I saw them just drop out of the air in pieces. I came back to warn the others but by that time… _he'd_ finished with us.' The Auror choked out the last few words with difficulty. She understood. He hadn't been indoctrinated into British wizarding culture enough to call the Dark Lord _You-Know-Who_. Pyrites was nodding, apparently, he'd not been notified of this development. He turned to Seneca and Selwyn suddenly.

'Miss Sade. Selwyn.' He greeted them, his warm manner returning. 'Where is Goran?' He asked Selwyn, sounding politely interested.

'I dismissed him.' Selwyn's crow-like voice replied. Pyrite nodded again.

'Seneca, you've done well.' He grinned. 'And not a scratch on you, I see.' He added almost disappointedly. 'I trust you got your hands dirty.' He said in an unreadable tone.

 _He doubts that you fought._

Seneca nodded, her shivering was bad and the chattering of her teeth made it impossible to speak. Pyrites' extended her hand and drew her into the centre of the circle with him and Mr. Gallow, the captured Auror.

'It's time to prove your loyalty as well as your fortitude, Seneca.' He smiled warmly and she looked around at the ring of pale faces that encircled her. 'I've finished with this man.' He gestured at the Mr. Gallow as if he was a piece of meat and then looked at her expectantly. 'Draw your wand.' He said softly and she did so.

'What do I do now?' She spoke very quietly, unable to raise her voice past a whisper.

'Kill.'

One word, no tone, no passion. A command.

Her wand was in her hand, her hand was pointing at Mr. Gallow's head. She shook violently. The Auror pleaded with her desperately, blurting out words nonsensically, he was crying. Her head was all fucked up; everything was like it was happening very far away—like she was high.

'Seneca—that's your name, right? —I gotta daughter, a little girl about your age, please—Her name is Annabelle—a beautiful little girl, please—she ain't got no mother—my wife, she—please, my little girl, my darling girl. Think about her. Seneca please, think about your father. Think about it—my precious girl, my daughter. An orphan—please don't.' He moaned, snivelling and pleading. Pyrites drew his own wand, the Auror's eyes darted to it for a second before they fixed on hers again. Tears streamed down Seneca's face but she didn't wail like he did. 'Ain't gotta—you ain't gonna take her daddy away—please!'

'I'm sorry, Mr. Gallow.' She murmured, she wanted him to stop whining, she couldn't stand it. He was pathetic and she couldn't stand it. She couldn't stand him. Her wand arm steadied for a second, between his eyes.

'No! Annabelle—' He chocked and lurched for Pyrites' wand, his wrist bindings had come loose, his hands gripped Pyrites' pale wand, Pyrites had been taken off guard. Seneca panicked, her training went out of her head.

 _'_ _Sectumsempra!'_ She said the first spell that came to her; the most recent one she'd learnt. Pyrites was wide-eyed. Mr. Gallow's head snapped back, blood arced in the air as he was thrown back. His face was a ruin. Her spell had caught him in the jaw, destroying it completely, his eye was lost, his face was slashed as if he'd been savaged by an invisible sword. His thick neck was opened. It was the most horrific thing she had ever seen. His skin was peeled off in places, the thin muscle was made into mince, the delicate bones of the face were shattered. As he splashed into the mud, oozing bloody secretions, Seneca screamed and fell back in the opposite direction.


	7. Chapter VI

_VI: Hypnagogia_

Seneca's grasp on reality was vaporous at best; Her forearm burned, Pyrites had finished her tattoo. She had given up trying to maintain consciousness an unknown amount of time ago. Everything blurred and burnt and blead; the world was dim, then too bright. She faded in and out of being slowly torn through the wasteland of broken bodies and tormented landscapes towards the black water of some far-off shore. Pyrites' bloody gloves were on her waist as he crossed them over her, folding her over his blazered shoulder. The notch of his collarbone dug into her womb and navel and then womb again with every laboured stride. Her body contracted and dilated in nauseating apparition and suddenly, the crashing of immense waves oversaturated her perception. She could feel only through her magic and recoiling senses, her brain shrunk from stimuli and she felt only the storm meeting the deep; the smell of brine, of sea-swell; the stinging of saltwater on her papery skin. Pyrites waded out into it and her extremities were progressively submerged until the twist of apparition overcame them again.

She was conscious of a sense of transit: being taken somewhere, then staying put and waiting, being discharged by Pyrites to be adopted by Snape's arachnoid arms. She expected an apathy in his grip but he held her fast. He was stumbling with her blindly through the rich smell of earth. Crawling back through the intestinal tract of the school's underbelly into its taciturn, stone precincts. She knew his fingers to be peeling her clothes from her limp body in a clinical, cold place—scalding water from a school shower-block faucet washing over her frozen, naked body. She was lucid enough to stare blankly at the pink water that slid from her goose-bumped skin down into the pipes, she was being held up at arm's length by alien hands. Snape's hands, she knew; he washed the mud from her hair and in that moment, through the artificial rain, she set her blue eyes on his black irises and they focussed ephemerally. His fingers didn't linger on any part of her, erogenous or otherwise. She thought then in her delirium that she saw something foreign to Snape's manner, a concern, almost a care feature in his impregnably phlegmatic countenance.

Finally, she was delivered into a basically made bed. She knew her dormitory, the dissatisfying familiar smells, lack of warmth, loneliness, wavering on the threshold of consciousness but also something unfamiliar. Snape had not left her. Initially, she had acknowledged, in her semi-awake state, that Pyrites was with her, a sentinel. It was a comforting presence, not dissimilar to a cat curled at the end of her bed. Her illusion was broken by a premeditated brush of cold fingers across her shower-heated cheek that swept her black hair from her white skin. They were belonging to Snape.

He kissed her there, where his fingers had touched her, where Pyrites' scar had been, adjacent to her gently pursed and sleeping lips.

He left and she remembered nothing.


End file.
